A Day at a Time: portugal

Saturday, July 9, 2022

Tagging Along on a Work Trip: Lisbon / Sintra

I fell in love with the city of Lisbon when I visited in 2016. I can't even fully explain all that endeared me to it, but I left there with a deep desire to return someday. When Glen's work conference in Barcelona came to fruition, I immediately suggested spending the weekend before the conference in Lisbon, so I could realize my dream of visiting again AND introduce Glen to this beautiful city!

Here is a little glimpse of our time there....

MAY 2022

When we were searching for a place to stay, I was drawn to a hotel connected to Sao Jorge Castelo, which is perched right on top of one of the seven hills of Lisbon. The location was cool and we were enchanted to find that there were peacocks all around the hotel.

The peacocks weren't quite so enchanting after a couple days of hearing their constant yelps, but we recognized the novelty of them and kept taking pictures anyway. haha

One of the things I felt most passionately about doing while in Portugal, was taking Glen to Sintra. Sintra is a charming, unique little town full of gorgeous scenery and one of the prettiest castles I've ever seen.

Getting to Sintra proved to be a little more complicated than we'd hoped for when the tour guide we'd hired came down with COVID and canceled on us last minute. After some scrambling, we figured out how to take a train to Sintra and then we hired a tuktuk tour guide when we got there.

We really enjoyed Cristina, our tuktuk driver/ tour guide. She was very knowledgeable and seemed to enjoy showing us around the interesting and charming spots around Sintra. We felt like we were getting a lot out of our tour and we we were quite happy with how the day was going...

We enjoyed seeing places and learning about them in ways we never would have been able to do on our own.

It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed the tuktuk as a way to get around town!

Unfortunately, Cristina ended up bailing on us after the castle tour and our new tour guide was rushed and much less personable.

He did take us along the seashore, where we got to see lovely sights like this, but we didn't learn much about them.

Oh well, I guess it didn't turn out too badly for everything being thrown together last minute. We were still enchanted by the town of Sintra....

and surrounding areas....

The rest of the pictures were taken in and around Lisbon....

We went to church at the ward right next to the temple (and dropped off a couple missionary packages while we were there). Afterward we enjoyed walking around the temple...

It was dedicated in 2019, so we'd never seen it before. It was as lovely and we were sad that we didn't have time to do a session (since we were only in Lisbon for all of 2 days--one of them being a day the temple was closed).

Eventually we found some decent gluten free food...

Mostly we just wandered and wandered around Lisbon...

taking in as many sites as we could...

We found another tuktuk and took a little tour around town and saw things we wouldn't have been able to see otherwise...

All in all, it was a great couple days in Portugal and it definitely still has my heart!

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Finishing Up in Portugal

It's taking me forever to get through the posts about our trip, but I'm motivated to document them here before we start to forget some of the details of it. This is the last of the posts on Portugal!

November 1-2, 2016
(these pictures were taken at two different beaches--Praia Grande and some other I'm not sure the name of)

The weather was so warm and pleasant while we were there, that we decided to visit the beach!

Although a lovely day, it was November and a tad too cold for full blown swimming, so the kids mostly played in the sand...

and just dipped their toes into the water. We figured out that we were pretty close to directly across the Atlantic Ocean from home there on the beach in Portugal, so we made sure to wave to our friends across the way!

Spence found some cool rocks to climb and believe me when I say that these were some very sharp rocks. I won't lie and say that I didn't feel a tad nervous about him scaling to his precarious position across the jagged rocks, but he made it up and down without incident, so all's well that ends well!

After exploring the beach for a while, we discovered a steep set of stairs that beckoned for us to climb them!

We climbed and discovered along the way that there was some well preserved fossilized dinosaur footprints along the cliff wall. Apparently about 60 of them. (Click here if you want to read more details)

We admired those for a bit and pondered on how there were footprints on the side of a sheer vertical cliff, but really just couldn't wait to get to the top, so we could take advantage of these amazing views overlooking the beach!

Wow, wow, wow!

It was worth every step of the steep climb!

Hiking and exploring are two of my favorite things to do in any circumstance, but doing them in a beautiful foreign land alongside people I love is pretty much what Lara dreams are made of!

My only disappointment with it all....

was that I couldn't make my camera capture the full measure of the beauty we experienced there.

That little hike was not all that strenuous, but it was like a salve to my soul. I wanted to absorb that serene beauty right into my body and take it home with me.

We'd loved so much of our time in Portugal and this day hiking and exploring at the beach, was a perfect capstone to a perfect week! This is exactly why I love to travel!

Eventually the time came to say goodbye to the beach and head back to the villa. On our way home, we stopped in a cute little port town called, Cascais.