Not much walking today

I slept in a little, did some wash, and after breakfast decided to go to the gym to do my elliptical workout. There are no classes on Friday, so I had to choose between whether I wanted to go walking for a few days nearby or get on a plane and go to visit my very close friends in Madrid. Since I hadn’t seen them in more than two years, it was an easy choice. This is another family whom I’ve known for more than 20 years, and on both professional and personal levels, we are very close.

Since my flight left Lisbon in the early afternoon, I didn’t really have much time to do other things, but I decided I would see how hard it was to walk to the airport. This is a question that comes up every now and then when people are wondering about starting their Caminho Português on foot from the airport. The Lisbon airport is closer to its dense urban population than any airport I’ve ever been in. It was only about 5 km from my hotel, and I must’ve been tracing the flight path, because there was a constant stream of planes that seemed awfully close to my head.

There were sidewalks and crosswalks the whole way, and though it wasn’t a beautiful city walk, it was perfectly fine. Based on what I saw, I don’t think there would be any problem walking either to central Lisbon or to the Parque das Naçöes if you wanted to skip the first part of the Camino from Cathedral.

The airport to the cathedral is about 5 miles/9 km, so it wouldn’t be a terribly long trek.

I haven’t really followed all the chatter about the new EU biometric boarding process, but it is being gradually implemented and will require digital and facial identification for all non-EU citizens, I think. Better security and more efficiency are the goals, I think.

Off to Madrid!Read more