Road Tripping in Portugal: The South

Hello all!

I'm blogging right now from a teeny town in the windy hills of Portugal. We're on day 5 of our road trip, and boy has it been a ride.  Portugal has been absolutely gorgeous, and oozing charisma.

Here's what we've been up to so far:

Day 1: Lagos

On the first day we picked up the rental car, a lovely black Nissan Micra that we've affectionately termed "the fruit fly" for obvious aesthetic reasons.  She's 5 manual gears of nothing but suave and finesse.

Once we got all settled, we wound around the coast of Spain and up into the hills and mountains outside Sevilla before we finally crossed the border:

The landscape was not ugly in the slightest:






We got to Lagos the first night, a cute little coastal town on the Mediterranean, and we had a home cooked breakfast served to us courtesy of Angela, the proprietor at our guest house and a grandmotherly Portuguese woman whose whole face crinkled up when she smiled.  She spoke to us in Portuguese. We spoke back in Spanish.  We all understood each other just fine - miracle.

Day 2: Evora, Lisbon

We headed out to a little town deep in rural Portugal that's famed for its chapel decorated entirely with human bones. 

Creepy, yes? We had lunch in Evora also, and The Mister ordered a creamy tomato soup that turned out to be a bowl of spaghetti sauce, served with a spoon.

Oh, did I not mention? Evora was beautiful.

After our time there, we headed to Lisbon, where we had Portuguese-style steak for dinner - thin beef fillets cooked in a gravy broth and served with a fried egg on top, served over a bed of french fries if you're lucky (and we were).

Day 3: Lisbon

We discovered how much Lisbon is like the San Francisco of Europe - hilly, breezy town bordered by the ocean on one side and a bay on the other. Their bridge looks pretty much exactly like the Golden Gate.  We checked out a couple castles and then climbed to the highest point in the city so we could look out over the whole thing.

 In the afternoon we went to a little bar that has Fado on Sunday afternoons - Fado being the traditional Portuguese singing that sounds a little bit like flamenco.  We were the only non-Portuguese patrons, and it was karaoke-style - everyone that was there, it seemed, would get up at the front and take a turn, and it was obvious they'd been doing this for years.  It was one of the coolest travel experiences I've ever had - I might need to write a whole separate post on that one time.

Day 4: Cascais, Sintra

We woke up and headed out of Lisbon toward the sunny beaches of Cascais.  Our mission was to see the famous "Boca de Inferno" rock formation below.  It was a windy day and the ocean spray danced wildly in the breeze.

After that we trekked down the road to Sintra, where we saw the coolest castle I've ever seen in my life. It looks like something out of Candy Land - colorful, with twisty ice-cream-cone shaped domes and turrets.  The whole thing is perched on a high hill overlooking the countryside, and surrounded by acres of lush gardens.  It used to be the summer residence of the Portuguese royal family.

I feel like a broken record because I keep saying that this was beautiful and that was beautiful, but suffice to say that pretty much our whole trip so far has been pretty inspiring.