July 18, 2007 We're here in Lisbon!

Lisbon is beautiful! The sidewalks are all paved with small (maybe 2 inch square) pieces of a light colored stone, and in many places they are decorated with elaborate patterns of dark stone. The city is bordered on the south by the Tagus River (Rio Tejo to you Portuguese speaking readers) which gives it a port feeling. High speed ferries roam the river transporting people to the town on the other side. A bridge looking identical but shorter to the San Francisco Golden Gate bridge (and reportedly built in the early sixties by the same company) crosses the river. The people seem friendly, and although many of those not working information desks or hetel desks don't speak English they are tolerant of us not speaking the language.

Our Best Western is a nice three star hotel around the corner from a major plaza and park. Equidsitant from the plaza, but on the other side we can see the Ritz Four Seasons (??) so we know we are in a good neighborhood. After our train arrived at 8:00 AM we stopped in the information office at the train station and got directions for the city bus to our hotel. We took a few pcitures of the "happy to be here finally" variety and headed around the corner to find our bus standing waiting. We hopped on, road it for awhile, found a stop that looked right and ended up at our hotel at 9:00 AM amazingly enough. Our room wasn't ready yet so we left our bags with the doorman and walked over to the park. A hop on hop off bus was just about to take off for a one hour, forty minute cicruit of the city, so we hopped on and rode around for a few hours to see the sights. Later in the day, after checking in to the hotel and taking a shower (trains are barely able to handle toilets, let alone showers) we rode the hop on/hop off bus again to a beautiful cathedral (Bascilica de Estrela). All in all, today was a great day for toruing. The weather was exceptional. It started out at 70 degrees and got to maybe 75 later in the day.

For those of you wondering about the night on the train, well here is the update. The bottom line is that neither of us slept well, albeit for different reasons. Mikie couldn't sleep because of the noise as the train made turns and hit the tracks and Deanne can't sleep in overheated accommodations and this sleeper was hot! No middle aged woman would have done any better in that train! Stripped down to our underwear (I know, not pretty), we sweated our way out of Spain and into Portugal. At some point during the night we stopped going over mountains and it got quieter and cooler and we both ot a few hours of sleep between 2:00AM and our wake up knock at 6:45.

I apologize for the typos in this section. It turns out that when you log into blogspot in Portugal, the web site interface is all in Portugues. Even the spell checker thinks in Portuguese. So, this isn't spell-checked.

One last thing, to Mike's high school and college friends who have written him with comments about the authorship of this blog, you are indeed correct. He is looking over my shoulder, so I won't say anymore. Forty years after college he still has a girl doing his writing for him.

Love you all,
Mike and Deanne