Transition Day: Porto to Lisbon
We had a good time in Porto, saw a few new things, met new people… I wanted to share a particular acquaintance we made with an 80 year old gentleman while we were doing laundry at the “lavendaria”. He wandered in and asked us for help in using the electronic system and we struck up a conversation. He was from Lima, Peru where he had a house but he liked to walk long distances and said it was not safe to do so in Peru due to “criminality”. At this point in time, we was walking the Camino de Santiago for his 3rd time and had stopped in Porto on his journey. He said it was one of his favorite things to do. He takes it slow and spends time stopping along the way to have new experiences. He loves meeting new people.
His native language was Spanish but he also spoke English and French well and liked to learn new languages. Barry speaks school learned French that he can remember and we both had a bit of Spanish. We absorbed Spanish during our year there but after being away from Spain, it is easy to forget. However we were able to communicate a bit in all 3 languages.
He was a fascinating gentleman who you would not guess was 80 years old. He was an engineer by trade but has lived in several places in the world including a few years in France where he got a doctorate in economics. He spent time living in Canada where his son lives and was going back there when this latest trip on the Camino was finished.
We had our first hairy moment in our travels in getting to the train station in Porto to catch our train to Lisbon. We had previously checked with our hotel staff about getting a taxi and she said no problem, they had a dispatch system at the hotel and they could have a taxi for us in 3-5 minutes. Our train was scheduled to depart at 11:32 so we worked back from there in planning our morning knowing we already had tickets and assigned seats. Our plan was to leave at 10:50 for the 12-15 minute taxi ride.
We left the hotel room a few minutes late but still had time in our schedule until we got to reception and they said it would be about 10 minutes for a taxi. We should have known that everyone says 5 minutes but that is rarely accurate in Portugal. Our taxi was even later than that leaving us only 15 minutes to get to the station. Our very nice taxi driver kept shaking his head and muttering that we weren’t going to make it. He decided to call his dispatcher to have them check to see if our train was on time. As we were approaching the station with 2 minutes to spare, they called back and said the train got into the station late.
As he pulled up to the front of the station, he pulled up onto the sidewalk and gave us explicit instructions on how to get to our platform in the shortest amount of time. It was 8 platforms away from where we were. We got there and they rushed us onto the train with 3 minutes to spare. The universe was smiling on us this day! We hurtled through the countryside at 140 mph between stations and arrived in Lisbon on time.
