Cascais

Today we decided to do the open-top bus tour to Lisbon and were told by the staff of the tourist office where we could get on the bus but it involved a long walk. We discovered later that we could have got it by the tourist office itself which was much closer. I don’t know what they were thinking of as we just wanted to get the bus, not walk half way to Lisbon first.

Once onboard we went straight upstairs which turned out to be a bad idea but it gave us great views. The wind was blowing and being high up without any shelter we felt the full force of it and were all glad that we had our jackets to keep the wind off and sunglasses for the dust that was blowing everywhere.

The large Portuguese flag had been hanging limp this morning just to mock me into thinking I should have left was by 11.00 again flying at full stretch and even beginning to shred a bit.

I have thought about making a dash for it at night when the wind eases but they are not many harbours available on the west coast of Portugal and if we got caught out it might mean another return to where we started from.
The nearest harbour was about 40 miles away and the nearest marina 80 miles.
I was still looking almost hourly at the forecasts but any easing of the winds seem to be only lasting for a few hours and with no end in sight, Maeve will probable be changing her flight to leave from Lisbon instead of Porto.

Anyway back to the tour. The bus seemed to make two circles of Cascais before we set off towards Lisbon. Maybe we had forgotten someone?
We eventually headed out the road towards Lisbon and often had to put our hands over our ears to hear the commentary over the wind.
The road travelled east near the coast and we could see a few yachts out on the Tagus among the white horses. Those that were out were well reefed and were keeping close to the shore for shelter. The was one yacht further out was beating into the wind and seemed to having a hard time of it. No place to be on a passage if you could avoid it!

We passed the famous monument to Prince Henry the navigator and also a number of coastal artillery forts overlooking the river, built to protect the approaches to Lisbon.
There were a number of small marinas that looked like they were built in the old docks but they certainly didn’t look very touristy and all seemed full, mainly with boats of less than 30 feet. I was glad I didn’t come upriver and try to get into one. I understand that there is one or two marinas just east of Lisbon that are more suitable but I never got to see them.

We changed buses when we got to Lisbon and had a fine tour of the city.
They have some lovely buildings and parks and we discovered that much of the city was destroyed in an earthquake and a subsequent tsunami in 1755.
The rebuilt city certainly had a planned feel about it.

When the tour was over we walked around Lisbon as Norma hadn’t seen it properly yet. Again we ended up in the square with the Carlsberg Screen only this time Portugal were playing Croatia. We had a nice meal but as it was in the tourist area the prices were similar to those at home.

We got the train back to Cascais. We’re well seasoned travellers on it now and went on a tour of both the Irish Pubs to see about watching the match tomorrow night when Ireland are playing France. This took a few drinks before we were satisfied at to where we'd be locating our posteriors tomorrow night and it was the early hours of Sunday morning before we arrived back on Eureka.Read more