Europe Spring 2025 – Portugal

May 1, 2025 3:39 pm admin

Hello! We are back in Europe again; this time for nine weeks. On our itinerary are Lisbon, Barcelona, Frankfurt, an 11 day guided tour of Germany, Switzerland and Austria, Sicily, several cities around Italy and a 9 day guided tour of Southern Italy. Four planes, 10 trains and 1 bus will be making us mobile. A lot of planning went into this one. We figure it will be our last long trip, so we are pulling out all the stops!

With our son Jordan’s generous gift of an Air Canada status upgrade, we travelled in style. Instead of our usual overnight stop in Toronto to break up the long trip, we flew Vancouver to Montreal and Montreal to Lisbon. And for the first time ever, we flew business class in pods! We were thrilled to be styling and the comfort and luxury eased the pain of the jet lag. The food was also great! Now we know what goes on behind the magic curtain!

Lisbon April 24 -29 2025

We slept a little on the plane but arrived at 9am so we were very tired all day. We managed to stayed up until 6-7pm haha.

Our Lisbon accommodation was an apartment hotel in the busy old town centre, with breakfast included. Each morning a bag of fresh pastries are left on our door and housekeeping stocked the fridge with fruit, yogurt, eggs and milk. Very convenient and delicious!

We visited the oldest book store in the world, BERTRAND BOOKSTORE. It was founded in Lisbon by two French brothers in 1732.

We walked down to the water to the  ‘Time Out’ market. It has around 36 restaurants and kiosks selling regional specialities, like sheep’s cheese, custard tarts, shellfish and grilled fish, wines and chocolates. Five top Portuguese chefs have restaurants here.

After lunch we stopped for a wine tasting of Portugal wines. The portions were dispensed from a vending machine.

An afternoon performance of Fado,  (fate) the folk music of Lisbon’s rustic neighborhoods, was next. Around since the mid-1800s, Fado is Lisbon’s blues — mournfully beautiful and haunting ballads about lost sailors, broken hearts, and bittersweet romance.

 

We experienced The 25th of April Carnation Revolution holiday, and the streets were filled with people celebrating 41 years of liberation from a dictatorship. Here’s some photos from our many walks around Lisbon!

We took a TukTuk tour around Old Lisbon. There are so many of these vehicles around town, some uniquely decorated. Our guide Marta was passionate about the history of the city and we enjoyed the tour.

We took the Metro to the area of Portugal we stayed in, in 2014! Flashbacks occurred and Joe recognized a restaurant we dined in – what a memory! These pieces are from a popular Lisbon artist that uses recycled materials in his works.

One day, while enjoying an appetizer at an outdoor patio, the leg of Joe’s chair broke off and sent him tumbling on to the cobblestone! Two kind passersby stopped and scooped him up and he survived unscathed. The restaurant was horrified. In typical Joe fashion, he saved his drink by holding it in the air during fall, where I grabbed it lol. (This is not the broken chair, but see? He’s still in one piece!)

A sunset river cruise on a sail boat made for a beautiful evening!

Midway through our last full day in Lisbon, a power outage occurred. The fellow at our front desk reported to us, gradually over an hour, that it was out in all of Portugal, Spain and reports of Italy and France. He also said (unconfirmed) that it was a cyberattack originating in Russia, which of course was false, but very scary!

We had a tour booked that day which we thought would be canceled as traffic was chaotic but our Italian guide magically arrived only a few minutes late and we enjoyed this amended half day tour of Sintra, Cabo da Roca and a wine tasting!

The power was still out when we returned; now concerned and hungry. Our lobby was dark and filled with worried guests; one couple said they could not find a restaurant able to serve dinner but we returned to a favourite tapas restaurant and enjoyed a warm meal.

Unsure what would happened to our flight to Barcelona the following day, we started packing our bags by flashlight. It had been 9 or 10 hours with no electricity but suddenly the lights started to flicker and then Eureka! The room filled with light and cheers of excitement could be heard from the streets and hotel rooms!

Stories of airports closures, passengers stranded there for hours/overnignt, our housekeeper stuck in our lift and many more people must have been! Trains stopped in the middle of nowhere and passengers had to exit, lineups at ATM’s, empty grocery store shelves and many more reports made our reliance on electricity a very clear wake-up call.

Luckily, our flight to Barcelona the following day was only delayed 45 minutes which we thought was miraculous considering! Well done Portugal!

We are in Barcelona now where it is their National holiday and our third day on this trip of limited restaurants open- stay tuned!

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