|
First day in Lisbon - Arrived later than planned, thanks to the delays getting out of Houston. Carmen tells me I slept alot on the Plane from Paris to Lisbon, I did not feel that rested. We got a horrible breakfast on the flight, it looked like a cheese Taco with tiny pieces of pimiento. It is not like me to not eat everything on planes, but this food I had to leave behind or I know it would have made me sick later on. Security was a bit crazy for me - Thanks to my Hernia surgery a month and my knee prosthesis, I now have to be set aside every time and be patted down. Well this guy in Paris, even stuck his fingers down the inseam of my pants!
The mistake we made was that we went thru security and then looking for the Priority Lounge left the secured area without knowing it. After relaxing a couple of hours we had to go through the pat down again. This time we got hassled over a container with water that just 2 hours ago they did not notice. I had wanted to take a shower at the Lounge and was told I was 10th in line, but after almost 2 hours I went again to see were I stood in line and now I was number 2 - 30 minutes later we left the lounge without showering. This is one of the cheapest Lounges we have ever visited, no hot items and just a few candies and instant coffee to choose from. Carmen fell asleep sitting on a chair and covered herself with her jacket. Now finally at our gate the plane was so full, due to the delay of several flight leading to this one. Carmen managed to cut the boarding line and I'm sure upset about 100 people, but nobody complained. She says her grey hair makes them forgive her. After a nice small meal on this flight and we were relaxed, , Flying over Spain we could see the Bay of Biscay and the Picos de Europa which we traveled on the Camino de Santiago on our bikes some years ago. Now in Lisbon, it was by far the smoothest landing into a new city we have ever had.... Carmen says it was due to having a female pilot. She was so impressed with the crew. The Metro Station is part of the Airport - we got in line to buy a few passes for the Metro to ride around for 7 days and a man walks up to me and offers me two passes with 5€ on each one worth of rides - He was about to leave Lisbon and he gave them to us. So we got on the Metro's (vermelho) red line which took us to our hotel, we did not have a SIM card yet so we found a McDonald right away, got some free Wi-Fi and found our hotel, a 10 minute walk and we were at our Holiday Inn Lisbon, 3 nights all on points. Very calm check in, I asked, since I am Diamond/Ambassador level could I have an upgrade, he checked and gave us the Junior Suite for 3 night for free. After checking in we went out for a walk and got lucky right away, walking down "Avenida Republica" we came on a large building which turned out to be a Bull Ring "Campo Pequeno" which they still have the occasional fight, but here they do not kill the bull. In this building they were having a very large wine tasting event with all the top Portugal growers in the building, we paid 8€ each and were given 2 wine glasses. We went around trying many wines, the ones you like you drank the sample and the ones you did not you would empty out at the next boot. Eventually we bought 3 bottles, we ended up eating some small open sandwiches since now after an hour here we were pretty tipsy. We could have tasted many more but after all day of traveling we were already pretty knocked. We left the event and carefully trying our best not too look like we were drunk made it back to the hotel. Fell asleep pretty quickly. Comments are closed.
|