Up a bit early for us. Seriously we’ve been sleeping in and enjoying the slow get up and not go fast pace. Made it to a cute little breakfast place, Claire’s, that lost its ability to cook the other day so it had simple fare like avocado toast with tomatoes and/or scrambled eggs and some pastries. Plus their cappuccino was the best we’ve had. And the tomatoes were in a delicious olive oil. And both Kirk and I just love the eggs here. Not sure if they are just better than ours or cooked different. They seem a deeper yellow too.
We had to check out by 10 which was the earliest check out we’ve had. Most are noon due to breakfast being served from 8:30-11. Well we did it and were on the road by 10:20 even after walking to breakfast, but not before Kirk had to squeeze out of the parking lot. These people park wildly.
We had a long journey b/c we decided to just power thru and head to Almeda to drop the car which was about 30 minutes north of Setubal, across from Lisbon. Kirk was just done driving our weird car and I don’t blame him. I spotted a castle on a hill in the distance and Kirk commented “I did not intellectualize the amount of castles around!” It’s true. Then we started talking about the amount of bad or missing information when planning this trip and just being here - from trying to get a Bolt at the Lisbon airport (nightmare there is a zillion people doing the same thing in small area, the almost train debacle, the lack of signs and trail markers, directions (just go down the hill and pointing down a hill that has 4 small alley ways you can pick from), do you flush tp or not? And it’s just a ‘10 minute detour’ 55 minutes later. Oh and I can’t forget “our credit machine is broken, we need cash”.
Well 2.5 hours later we find the Sixt drop off in the back alley of an Audi dealership. Weird but whatever and roll up about 1pm and it’s dark. Closed for lunch until 2pm with no key drop off. Yep, been here a month and this never crossed our mind. I think we are just tired! 2pm came and the employee did a cavity search of the car. Jeezy creezy. Called a bolt and as soon as that arrived a huge truck hauling cars pulled in to block our ride! Well we finally got in and had a super interesting gent from Pakistan. Lawyer and highly educated and what I assume was/is a rich family but couldn’t stand all the corruption there. Lived in the US for a bit, has his visa, learned English, moved back to Pakistan and then moved to Portugal and is waiting for his citizenship and they just changed it from 5 to 10 years. He is on year 3 and plans to wait it out and take some classes. But he was very talkative and not a listener so we just nodded and commented rarely. Similar to our driver to Sintra. Arrived in Setubal at about 3 and checked in our hotel. I’m sad about this one. I wanted to end on a high note but it’s the least nice of all of them. I had high hopes but its weird and feels a bit cheap. Oh well! Mostly amazing places and this isn’t the worst.
Had some meh food and good wine. Trying not to be a whiner but I am doing it. Walked around and came back to the hotel and just got in bed and stayed. No dinner. Tomorrow we will hit the last castle, have some good food and get ready to head to the airport Sunday morning.
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