PORTUGAL

It's hard to believe but our time in Portugal has come to an end.  We have really enjoyed reacquainting ourselves with this lovely country and our apartment in Cascais was the perfect place from which to explore the Lisbon area.  

A little commentary on this country before I get to the pictures of our various sightseeing adventures.  The Portuguese people are some of the warmest we have ever met and the country is not only beautiful but so clean and well-kept.  That being said, there are some serious problems here.  As a local we ran into while in the Sintra forest (he was out for his weekend run) put it - this is paradise for living . . . . but not for working.  Some examples:  We disembarked and expected to have to spend time going through immigration.  Not so - seems no one showed up that day so we entered the country with no one stamping our passports!  It will be interesting to see what happens when we leave at the end of our trip and they want to know when we entered the Schengen Zone since our first stamp will be exiting it into the UK.  And, the tollroads are interesting here, too.  To raise money, in 2012 the Portuguese turned regular highways into toll roads.  But there was no place to put toll booths so they made them electronic only - fine for locals but not so great for foreigners.  After much research on line we found that we needed to buy a prepaid card at the post office, get it validated through texting and then place it on our windshield.  The only problem was that no one ever answered our texts so it never got validated.  I guess no one came to work that day!  No wonder they have 25% unemployment!  But, no worries.  We put our unvalidated ticket on our windshield and sailed through all the toll booths on our way out of the country - I guess the highway patrol weren't working that day either.

Anyway, back to sightseeing.  Our first day of exploring was in the Sintra area.  This area is full of palaces for it is where the Portuguese royalty had their summer residences and hunting grounds.  The town of Sintra is very quaint and we had a great lunch of grilled sardines.

From there we were able to make a loop to visit Pena Palace, the largest of the royal palaces,

the Capuchos Convent (a religious sect with monasteries all through Europe) which is also called the Cork Convent as all the walls, doors and windows are covered in cork

 and Monserrate, which was actually built by a very wealthy Englishman in the 1800's. 

We also played some golf which was great fun.  The one course, Areiola, really reminded us of Pebble Beach.  It was close to the ocean and was lined with evergreens.  Really beautiful.

We had many more adventures, including a day train trip into Lisbon, but that's enough photos for now.  We will leave you, bid you Bom Dia from our terrace and catch up with you again in Gibraltar.