Travel Day - Evora to Lisbon

We stored our luggage at the hotel and went to explore the walled town, which was a 5 minute walk. The historic centre of Evora is a Unesco World Heritage site. It was a Roman town in the 2nd to 4th centuries and there are still some well preserved Roman ruins. It only took us an hour to do a self-guided walking tour of the town. The most bizarre thing we saw was the Church of St. Francis and the Chapel of Bones. The church itself was very ornate but the adjoining Chapel was eerie. Three monks decided to unearth bodies from Evora churchyards and cemented the bones and skulls to the walls of the Chapel. Evora was a wealthy town in the 16th century so the Franciscan monks thought this would provide a place to meditate about material things in the presence of death. I wondered if this macabre place really had an effect on the townsfolk shopping habits. The other thing that was odd was the professional photographer who stood at the entrance and offered to take your photo in the Chapel. I don’t know what she was charging but everyone but us was getting a souvenir photo taken.

The weather today was very unusual. We started out with sunshine which quickly turned to heavy rain and strong winds. Ten minutes later there would be blue skies again. The clouds were just flying by and we could almost predict when the next downpour would happen. Eventually we just had continuous showers.

John’s mood soured and he refused to walk another step on cobble stoned streets so we had to take a taxi to the train station less than a km away from the hotel. The train to Lisbon was an older train and not one of the high speed ones we were used to in Spain. In 1 1/2 hours we arrived in Lisbon. Just as I was about to step off the train onto the platform, the train started moving. I was the last one to get off and fortunately the conductor was nearby so I yelled at him to stop the train, avoiding disaster. After a bit of confusion we walked a short distance to find the Lisbon Metro station and when we surfaced we were relieved to see our hotel, the Turim Av Liberdade, across the street. The most difficulty we had was the several flights of steps in the Metro station. I heard a lot of foul words from the sourpuss bouncing his 46 pound luggage first down, then up the steps!Read more