Arrival in Portugal

We’re back in Portugal! We flew out from SFO on the April 17th on TAP Air, which is an adventure in and of itself. I don’t know what makes TAP so unique this way, but they always have weird little quarks. To start with, I bought Known-Traveler-Numbers (KTNs) for us for Christmas a couple of years ago. When you purchase airline tickets online they provide a little space for you to enter the KTN… this gives you TSA privileges to go through the short line. There’s no place to input this number on the TAP site. I did a little reconnaissance and discovered that it can be put in when you check in for the flight. Unfortunately, it only lets you do one passenger, so I had to start the whole process over again to get Joe in there! But we got to go through the short line.

Flying eleven hours means movie-binging time to us. I watched Zootopia 2, Flow, Frozen, and Miss Congeniality. We arrived in Lisbon at 3:00 pm completely exhausted. I forgot to mention that Europe is rolling out a new system for controlling its borders… which is codeword for chaos. First I got a notification from TAP saying we needed to download the new app to register our facial and fingerprint recognition. I looked at the app and discovered it’s a piece of junk and doesn’t function at all. When we arrived we had go to a special line that led to a wall of facial and fingerprint machines. I took special note of the frustrated app owners who also had to stand in this line. Six of the twenty machines were functioning. Then we got the joy of standing in the immigration line for over an hour.

After we got our sim cards switched out, we ordered an Uber and went to Oscar’s house. His fluffy little white dog, Kiara, led us to our room with little encouraging woofs. We walked next door to check out the park I saw on the map. Wow! What a great discovery. It was full of families and dogs. We sat at the café and watched until our stomachs started growling.

The next morning we went back to that café for coffee before heading to the bus depot which was a polar-opposite version of the park. My favorite was the oily gentleman sidling up to people and offering to sell them a priceless gold Timex watch. We watched in fascination as he cornered a twenty-year-old guy and somehow convinced him to hold the watch… BIG mistake. Never, ever, agree to hold something someone is trying to sell. They will not take it back. If you find yourself in this situation lay the priceless gold watch on a nearby surface and walk away.

Our arrival in Armacao de Pera was uneventful until we got to the door of our Airbnb and no one was there to greet us. After a few text messages to Pascal in France he sent me the number of Angela, the door greeter. I called her and quickly realized she didn’t speak English, but fortunately someone near her took over. Apparently Angela had gotten the wrong time for us. Five minutes later a Portuguese dude showed up to let us in.

We went to our favorite beach bar and watched the children wrestle in the sand. Then we went to Smiley’s Pizza for the best pizza in Portugal. Joe dozed off at the table a few times so I hustled him back to the condo and tucked him in bed. By the way, the last time we stayed here, we loved everything but the cement bed. Since then Pascal bought a mattress topper and the bed was heavenly last night. 

Now we’re on track and I’m sipping an espresso from the little Nespresso machine and Joe is working out in front of me, which is a better view than the beautiful pool off the deck. Life is good.