Portugal Holiday

We returned this past Friday from a two-week holiday in Portugal. Although we lived in Spain for ten years, we had never made it to Portugal, Spain's western neighbor on the Iberian peninsula. From our time in Spain, we knew we were not going to a tropical paradise--I wrote too often about how cold the winters were in Spain. But we expected sun and light and somewhat warmer temperatures than those that had recently begun to creep into Cincinnati. We were right for most of the time.

Our first two nights were in Lisbon, where we had a beautiful and comfortable hotel within walking distance of the port and the Bairro Alto (the upper neighborhood), where we enjoyed the views, good fish, and fado music. We thought Cincinnati was hilly, but the Cincinnati hills have nothing on those in Lisbon. We walked up and we walked down. I felt it in my legs the next day when I woke up. In fact, my calves did not get back to normal for an entire week. When we moved to Porto on the third day of our holiday, we discovered hills there, too. Lots of them.

In Porto we had a fantastic apartment with cooking facilities and an open kitchen and living room, in addition to the bedroom and bath.  We liked it so much that we immediately extended our planned three-day visit to six. We were conveniently located in the Cathedral area, a stone's throw from the São Bento train station. It served as a great  central point for our walks down to the port area (and then back up), two excursions on the yellow hop-on, hop-off city bus tour, a day trip to Guimarães, the birthplace of the Portuguese nation, a metro ride to the Casa de Música for a Carnaval concert the Sunday night before Ash Wednesday, and daily trips to the nearby grocery store for provisions for breakfast and our evening meals.

Surprisingly, we started to get little drizzles of rain the last day we were in Porto, and the cloudy weather continued after we returned to Lisbon for three more nights.  Our apartment near the Santa Apolónia station wasn't quite as nice as the one we had in Porto, but it was adequate, and we had two days there to see a different part of the city. The last day we took a local train out to Gare do Oriente to be close to the airport for an early flight the following morning. This is a modern and bustling new part of the city, and we enjoyed the shopping mall and seeing the outside of the convention center.

It was a relaxing trip, one we needed after the intense preceding month, and we find that with this vacation we no longer race around trying to see as much as we can see. One planned sightseeing or cultural event a day, a meal out, shopping for and preparing a meal in, keeping up with emails and Facebook (Johannes posted most about our sightseeing), some reading, writing, TV, or iPad games is about the right speed.

We came home refreshed and pretty much relaxed.