Saturday July 28 Beautiful Obidos

We have moved on to a wonderful little town near the coast of central Portugal called Obidos (O-bi-DOSH) We read about this town in an English language real estate magazine which recommended it as the next up and coming place to invest. It is a walled city full of winding cobblestoned streets and whitewashed homes and shops. It took us all day yesterday (Friday) to get here. A two hour drive took 8 hours by train with four transfers. To those of you who follow in our footsteps… rent a car in Portugal, don’t do trains. The difficulty with cars is not the driving, it is the parking. The roads are good and the people seem to respect the laws (like side of the road to drive and stoplights). The problem with trains is that there is one north-south route running between the cities of Porto at the north, Lisbon in the center and Faro in the south. If you are traveling to small towns as we are, you must transfer in one of these large cities to get onto a smaller train system, then possibly transfer time and time again to get to your destination town. Obidos is in the wine country, so we had beautiful train trips getting here, but it was tiring to travel from 8:00 am until 5:00. We are burning through expensive paperback mysteries, which at $15 each chew up our budget.

Yesterday’s travel resulted in several planned and unplanned stops. We successfully traveled from Setubal to Lisbon, but got incorrect directions in Lisbon and ended up in the nearby resort town of Sintra, where an tourism information booth worker advised us to turn around and return part way back to Lisbon as we had overshot our connection on the commuter train. The little stop down the line where we had to return and await a connection required us to sit on a bench for a few hours. As it was near lunch, we decided to roll our bags, carry our backpacks and haul ourselves in search of lunch. The ticket office guy suggested the restaurant across the street where Deanne met the first of the old ladies that flocked around her all day, annoying the heck out of Mike. As we were seating ourselves in this cool restaurant, the old lady at the next table, decked out in dress and hat advised me in exuberant Portuguese just how to arrange the roller bag and backpack so as to not have them stolen from their spot against the wall. When she was not satisfied with my arrangement, she got up and redid them, grabbing my arm several times to make her point about how to do it better. When Mike got up to use the men’s room and passed me his bag to hold, the old lady once again jumped into gear explaining how to fasten the pack around my torso rather than setting it anywhere so that it would be safe. She had quite a conversation with me that was, of course, totally undecipherable. One of the waiters came by and tried to explain to her that I only spoke English. She wasn’t have any of it though, she liked me. She kept talking and he explained the bottom-line to me: she had family in England somewhere. The second old lady was begging and came by our table with her hand out. Against Mike’s advice Deanne gave her some money and then she would not go away. She sat down at the next table and wouldn’t leave. The waiters asked her to leave, but she wasn’t going. That was enough for Mike to load us up and leave. In the meantime, we had eaten a huge lunch of thin, but big ultra-rare steak and fries (Mike) and pork roast and new potatoes (me).
The train didn’t actually stop in the town we had reservations to stay in, so we stopped in the next train past town, and rather than wait in the station for a train going back forty-five minutes later, we grabbed a taxi and traveled the 8 kms to our hotel. We are staying in a beautiful converted convent that was built in 1830 with money provided by King Miguel. After three years of construction Miguel’s brother, King Pedro was in charge and he didn’t support sending the nuns to live here, so it became a private residence and finally an inn. We had a great night’s sleep in this pretty room with its own small courtyard, and a wonderful breakfast full of pastries. Last night was again laundry night, so Mike fashioned a fancy clothesline in the bathroom and we washed another three or four days of clothes.

This morning we set out to explore this beautiful little town and found it enchanting. Hopefully you will enjoy seeing us trekking up and down the town streets and the castle walls. Mike found his “people” today – a troop of scouts came through town wearing hiking boots and skirted hats just like his boots and sun protection hat. So, we have pictures of Mike with his “cool” gear along with the kids looking equally cool.

For all of those interested... we heard from Caitie. She is in Poland. Catherine's grandmother is quite ill so they both went to visit.