From beaches to castles to home again

The journey is now complete for this adventure. We started out at home…

We visited beaches…

We’ve seen many castles, some near, some from afar…

We’ve seen lots of tiles, terraces and greenery…

Now it’s time for a brief rest before we head back to America.

Some final thoughts…

We had been to Portugal 3 times before. Once to the Algarve in the south, once to the central area with stays in Obidos and 2 nights in Porto and once when we were living in Spain, we drove across for a quick 3-day trip along the south coast to see past favorite places.

This time Barry wanted to have more time to explore Porto and we had never been to Lisbon on previous trips. We allotted 7 days at each of these 2 destinations. We found that 7 days was too long to spend exploring these 2 cities given our previous trips to the country. After 5 days we were ready to move on but due to ticket and hotel commitments, we managed to barely fill in all the hours. In the future we would opt for no more than 5 days in a location but probably 3 is the magic number. With that, if you want more, you can usually go back.

For our future train travels, since we travel off-peak, we would not be so locked in with our itinerary and our prebooked tickets and hotels. We met a woman from London on the train ride to Madrid whose husband worked long hours and her kids were now grown so she was traveling through Europe by rail for a few months. All she had was a train map of Europe and she used travel websites to find places to stay with no fixed itinerary other than meeting her husband in Toledo, Spain for their wedding anniversary. There are some trains, such as the Eurostar and the TGV that require prebooked tickets so we would learn which those were and plan accordingly.

We met a lot of nice people on our trip and were surprised by the number of Americans and British travelers we encountered. We all shared stories and enjoyed the brief time we had in conversation. We met a British couple in line for our flight back to England who lived in the beautiful town of Estoril we visited. She works for an American IT company and she lived all over the world as she was sent to different locations to fix problems. They were living in Estoril by the beach but had previously been in Croatia.

We had very little problem communicating as most service people spoke English. Although neither of us spoke Portuguese, a smattering of Spanish and French were enough to get by when English didn’t work.

So, its farewell to Portugal for us. I doubt we will return since there are so many other places to see and we pretty much exhausted our exploration of the country in our 4 visits.

Our next adventure will be a trip on the Marrakesh Express from Tangier in north Africa. That will happen after our trip home to the US for a few weeks. We are probably going to go in December. We had previously been to Africa on a day trip on the ferry when we lived in Spain and the December weather was perfect.

I hope you’ll tune in for that one. Until then…

Step 1: England to France

Saying goodbye to Lisbon