A few months after I returned from my trip to South America, I began planning a three week trip to Portugal and was ready to depart in late March 2020 but the Covid-19 pandemic ended those plans. I optimistically rescheduled the trip for October but the pandemic raged on. For leisure travelers, most of 2021 wasn’t much of an improvement but the world began slowly reopening toward the end of the year.
Enticed by a music festival trip to Vienna, Salzburg, and Prague organized by Earthbound Expeditions, I shortened the trip to Portugal eschewing the country’s north to focus mainly on the Algarve and Lisbon. Here’s a rough approximation of where I was courtesy of Google Maps.
I started in Cascais and made day trips to Sintra, Óbidos, and Peniche. (Since I’m not a surfer, I didn’t go to Nazaré which is the home of the famous big waves.) From there, I traveled south to the Algarve stopping in Sagres, Lagos, and Tavira before returning northwesterly to spend a few days in Lisbon.
I have two additional prefatory points before we dive in. First, if you sense moments when I express disappointment, particularly in writing about the Algarve, it’s because I’d hoped that I’d become so enamored of at least one of those towns that I’d consider making a second home there. Had pleasure been my only reason for traveling to Portugal, the trip and the Algarve would have been a delight but I missed making a hoped for connection.
Second, many of the posts have music references either in the post or its title. Before moving on to Vienna, I’ll provide you with a guide.
Now, let’s set out for a little adventure.
My first post Covid travel experience
Before I land in Europe, I want to talk about some of my flight experiences and the way both the Covid-19 pandemic and I have changed the manner of my travel. I’ll start with the biggest change I made which was the decision to fly business class. Although some people might be shocked at my willingness to pay so much for my airfare, I found the experience rewarding enough that I plan to repeat it on any future travel involving flights exceeding five hours. (The Covid-19 mask requirement played a small part in this decision and I’ll detail that below.)
The trip started with expedited check-in which is nice because not only do you have to produce your passport for overseas flights but current Covid-19 requirements sometimes include providing documentation of a negative test or at least signing an affidavit to that effect. From there, international business class provides access to the airport lounge (in my case, Air France outbound and KLM on the return). The lounge was spacious, private and stocked with food and drink. Then, at Dulles (and only there), they used facial recognition when I boarded the flight and I never had to produce a boarding pass.
Once on board, it looked like this:
The seat reclines to a flat 180º and they provide a small kit with socks, an eye mask, toothbrush, and toothpaste. The meal was elegant – shrimp with lobster sauce, green and quinoa salads, and a nice dessert all served on china with real silver. Of course, there was also essentially bottomless beer or wine if one desired. I watched Free Guy as I lingered over my dinner for about an hour and a half to minimize my mask wearing. (Air France still required masks on all flights although the flight crew didn’t strictly enforce that requirement.)
When it came time to sleep (and they ask if you want to be awakened for breakfast) I laid the seat flat, loosened my seatbelt, turned on my side to face the window so I could at least keep my nose uncovered. I deplaned from this trans-Atlantic flight more refreshed and relaxed than any previous long flight.
Relaxed, that is, until I entered the chaos of Charles de Gaulle Airport where I had to transfer to a flight to Lisbon. There were no signs or staff to provide assistance or direction. I knew I’d have to pass through immigration because this is the first step in entering the EU. CDG is utter mayhem. Here are a few comments from the website airlinequality.com that also provided the photo below:
“Avoid CDG if possible. The staff are very rude. Trying to do what they can to be as rude as possible. Unhelpful.”
“A chaotic airport at best to describe this place. If you do not speak French you will get little help – at least this was my experience. The signage showing directions to other gates and the train could have been better placed…”
“Very poorly organised airport! Lots of security checks and controls – understanding and that France has a lot of rules, they should adapt more people working to have more border control gates open.”
Ask one person where to go and they tell you up. Ask another and they’ll say down. Growing more frustrated by the minute and having traipsed more than a mile through the airport, I finally got into one of the PARAFE automated border crossing lines unsure whether it worked for U.S. as well as EU citizens. When I asked an equally frustrated French woman standing behind me whether the line would work for me, she said, “I don’t know. This is France. What the first person tells you to do is shit. What the next one says is also shit.”
After all this, I still had to take a bus to get to the terminal for my connecting flight (which fortunately departed 25 minutes late) and pass through security on my way to the gate. Had the flight been on time, it would have been a very close call.
Portugal at last
I used the nearly three hour flight to Lisbon to release the stress that had built up at CDG and by the time I arrived in Portugal, I was much more relaxed. The driver from Portugal Trails met me at the airport and we had a smooth 45 minute ride to the hotel in Cascais which was located inside the cidadela
and, of course, the room wasn’t quite ready so I had plenty of time to walk around, acquaint myself with the immediate area, make some general observations, and take some photos.
In my walk, I noted that while graffiti was abundant, the streets were essentially litter free – a situation I found repeatedly throughout the country. (Perhaps it’s policy to tolerate one but not the other.) While the area near my hotel clearly catered to vacationers, the rest of the town seemed rather quiet – a sort of extended bedroom exurb of Lisbon. Near the beach, I saw an abundance of women wearing tight leather pants. On the beach the clear preference was thong bikinis. There was almost always some sort of hybrid game of soccer / volleyball happening on that little section of Praia da Ribeira.
Dinner that night consisted of salad, Sagres beer, grilled cuttlefish, and a couvert of olives and bread. (While the Portuguese tradition of placing the couvert on the table and adding a charge unless it’s sent back without being touched seems to be waning that was not the case at the small restaurant I had dinner. But I was hungry and I knew to expect the charge.)
The restaurant itself, O Cantinho da Belinho, was interesting. With the courtyard closed, it was very small. It could accommodate only about 20 diners and it was a little tricky to get in. Small and a bit out of the way from the typical tourist traffic, the door sign said empurre (push) but one actually had to pull a little cord to open the door.
Once inside and seated, I noticed that the television had the Portuguese version of the American game show The Price is Right. The staff soon switched it to a soccer game. All the patrons but me and an Irish couple were Portuguese and the cooks were four older women barely visible as they bustled around the kitchen behind some loose cloth draped across the open space.
It was a lovely dinner and a nice end to a long two days.
(Footnote: I drafted this post on 23 May and on 25 May, in my weekly email from the Washington Post titled The Optimist, the headline for one of the featured stories was, “Surfing a record 86-foot wave took guts. Measuring it took 18 months.” and the caption under the photo in the story read, “Sebastian Steudtner, a 37-year-old surfer from Germany, rode a giant wave in October 2020 in Nazaré, Portugal. After 18 months of detailed analysis, he learned the wave measured 86 feet, making it the largest ever surfed.” This would be 26.21 meters. So there you go, surfers.)