First, I want to thank all of you who have reached out to me to say that you enjoyed virtually following DW and myself as we travelled throughout Portugal the last couple of weeks. Your encouragement made me want to keep writing posts, even though our days were full and we would get back to wherever it was where we were staying, to type up something for you to read.
Secondly, I want to thank everyone who sent me words of encouragement and support after yesterday's post. I've been avoiding social media since DW and I have returned: first, because we were tired and worn out; also, because as soon as we tested positive for COVID-19, I felt embarrassed and stupid over the risks we took at certain times, when we should have been even more careful.
You folks are amazing.
Some of you have asked me for more details about our trip. I can assume that perhaps you are planning your own trip to Portugal and want some advice and recommendations. I'm only too happy to help.
Over the next week or so, I'll try to recreate and summarize key points of our trip: where we went, how we got from place to place, where we stayed, what we ate, and more.
What do you say? Want to take another virtual trip to the Iberian Peninsula with me? Let's go!
As many of you know, Portugal wasn't our original vacation destination. It wasn't even on our radar. Originally, DW and I were looking at a trip to southern Spain, to Seville and the surrounding territory.
But when we looked at airfare to Madrid, and then a train to Seville, the costs were more than we wanted to spend. We started looking to see if we could fly somewhere else, for less, and we saw that Lisbon was about as close to Seville but that airfare was much less (we paid about $650 Canadian, return, each).
Neither of us knew anything about Lisbon, so we checked out some YouTube videos and fell in love with the city. Suddenly, Seville was being bumped for another time and Portugal became our go-to destination.
As we began planning in earnest, we worked out where we would go and when. We wanted to be in the Douro Valley for harvest season, which generally falls from mid to late September. So we planned to go to Porto as our first destination, with a day trip up the Douro River.
The line up for security was really long but it moved quickly. It took nearly an hour to get through it but we never stood still in one spot. At the time, most people were wearing masks, though the person who was sitting next to me on the plane only wore hers some of the time.
As our plane made its final approach to the Lisbon airport, DW and I became excited as we could see the coastline lit up. It was still more than an hour before sunrise, but we could see the town of Cascais (we thought) and then the April 25 Bridge, over the Tagus River, the Monument of the Discoveries, the Belém Tower and the city rushed under us as we came in for a landing.
It was one of the rare times, passing through customs and immigration, where we've actually had our passports stamped. This line was surprisingly long, at 6:30 in the morning, and it took us longer than we expected to get out, but we were still in good shape.
Our first order of business, once we stepped outside the airport, was to get to the subway to make our way to the Oriente train station, from where we'd catch our ride to Porto. Having studied Google Maps for many of our destinations, I led DW to the metro as though I had been there a hundred times before.
We purchased two Viva metro cards from an easy-to-follow machine (50 cents each) and loaded them up with 10 euros. The Viva card is good for subways, buses, trains, trams, and funiculars in Lisbon. We only needed it for a one-way trip, that morning, but we knew we'd be using it plenty, when we returned to Lisbon in another week.
The metro from the airport to Oriente station took only six minutes and let us out in a huge underground shopping mall. Only a few shops were open, mostly coffee shops and snack bars. We had plenty of time to catch our train, so we searched for a cash machine where we could get ourselves some euros.
This was the tricky part.
We tried bona fide banks that displayed the Plus symbol on their machines, but our Interac cards (though they work on Plus networks) were rejected. There were plenty of Euronet ATMs in Portugal, but they charge huge fees for withdrawals, as much as 13 percent, so we wanted to avoid them.
In the end, we thought we'd wait until we reached Porto and try again. We found a Jeronymo shop at the entrance to Oriente Station (it's basically a Portuguese Starbucks but with way better food) and used our credit card to buy us breakfast, before getting to our platform and catching our train to Porto.
It was first-class all the way, and I'll continue with the Porto portion of our first day, tomorrow.
Stay tuned.
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