Took a day off from the beach yesterday

That Portuguese vacation atmosphere can be so exhausting. Instead of beaching, we took a coastal bus from Cascais to Sintra, a royal vacation spot of yore that all the guide books said we had to check out. The bus flew around sinuous turns and blustered by cliffs with no embankments to speak of, but I was quite comfortable. You can shoot me out of a cannon to get from point A to point B, but as long as I’m not in a plane, I’m perfectly happy. The bbf, on the other hand, got sick to his stomach and remembered the statistics about Portuguese car accidents numbering the highest in Europe.

The bus stopped at Cabo da Roca, the continent’s westernmost point, long enough for two Japanese tourists to climb aboard and immediately fall asleep (those people are travel pros). En route to Sintra, we also sped through tiny Portuguese towns where fat little dogs and young skateboarders stuck their heads through metal fences to watch us pass. On those narrow streets, the bus came within inches of their adorable noses.

Sintra sits at the foot of a lushly forested mountain. At the top of the mountain, the Moorish Castle and the Palace of Pena overlook the city. So we had to figure out how to climb the mountain. I wanted to walk, but the bbf wanted to take a bus convertible, one of those roofless contraptions that tourists always snob around in. Thankfully, I listened for once and we didn’t have to hike five miles straight uphill while the aforementioned accident-prone vehicles sped past. And it was fun to wave at the naive hikers far below our bus when they collapsed from dehydration.

I was grateful to have energy left over for climbing to the top of the castle ruins and checking out the Sintra valley. I even had energy left to shove some American teenagers out of the way when they obstructed my camera view. When my family lived in England for a year when I was a kid, castle ruins were my and my siblings’ favorite weekend destinations. At places like Kenilworth, we didn’t have to worry about breaking Tudor furniture or stomping on some queen’s garden; we could just scale the crumbling walls and imagine ourselves to be ancient royalty (albeit the kind that got rained upon). Ignoring the personal danger involved in climbing medieval turrets like trees, castle ruins are great places for kids. And I still love them. Especially when you can walk a precipitous wall within inches of your (or some obnoxious teenager’s) certain death.

After the Moorish Castle, we wandered farther uphill to the Palace of Pena, a former monastery that fell into ruin, like most everything in the Lisbon area, after the great earthquake of 1775. But the Portuguese royals renovated the monastery in the 19th century, converting it to their summer palace, and possibly the original inspiration for Disneyland. The palace sprawls over the mountain, incorporating “Oriental,” Arabic, and other Eastern influences in its architecture – very trendy at the time. Inside, we spotted a painting that seemed to depict dogs playing poker, but they turned out to be monkeys. Thank heavens King Carlos had at least that much taste.

Does anyone need another travel blog? Probably not. More to the point, is anyone envious yet? I heard that it’s in the 90s in Virginia. It’s sunny and in the low 80s here. But I’ve done my time in the Virginia summer. This trip is my reward for two summers spent in Williamsburg, VA, breaking into hotel swimming pools and sweating through underpants.

Tonight I think we’ll walk to the big Cascais nightclub called “Coconuts.” If they are spinning bad European techno, we might even go in.

Pictures!

5 Thoughts on “Took a day off from the beach yesterday

  1. “is anyone envious yet?”

    *whimper*

  2. Ed Ho on July 15, 2008 at 2:43 pm said:

    People are so jealous, they will skip over this.

  3. Eh, they would probably skip over this anyway. But I promise to take topless bikini pictures (of European babes) soon.

  4. Diana on July 15, 2008 at 11:29 pm said:

    Be sure to be on the look-out for hooker street, if you make it into the heart of Lisbon. I highly recommend spending the night in the hotel that overlooks it (close to the public square with a statue of some dude on a horse), so you can spy on them at night. That was the most entertaining part of the entire trip and made me wish for a diary.
    I’ll bet you can get a few prize-worthy blog entries out of that!

  5. Lisa on July 17, 2008 at 9:03 am said:

    Anyone who doesn’t admit they are jealous is lying!

    I will say that we had ONE very nice temperate day this week – yesterday. That was good news for me since Wednesday is swim meet night and the normal experience includes 4 hours of sweating under the beating sun wondering why you ever allowed your child to join the swim team and how can you possibly get them to quit as soon as possible.

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