Today we dock. Phew – just walk on and off whenever you want. Nice! We are supposed to be in around 6:15a, but we end up being a lot later than that – more like 7:30 – and we’re tugged the pier….hmmmm…… Not that it matters to us any – our plans are a leisurely gym visit, coffee and then just a walk around the town. We’ve been here, oh, I don’t know, 4 times? And we’ve never just stayed in town and explored. So, we figured this would be a good day to do it.
We get our gear together and are out on the dock a little before 9. It’s brisk (again with the wind), and pretty cloudy, but we strike out uphill in search of the botanical gardens around the Palace and hope for the best. As it turns out, we never had rain, and by the time we made it to the gardens, I had my jacket off and long sleeves pushed up. (It was a slow, but steady uphill climb the whole way, btw!)
The gardens are really beautiful and totally wild in the middle of the city. Bamboo, huge pine trees, those fig trees with the roots that stretch out above ground (at least we think it was a fig tree, there were all sorts of flora and fauna there and we had no idea what most were - Portuguese being very hard to read and translate!). Not that it mattered, it was just beautiful and amazing to walk around and traipse through narrow little trails matted with pine needles. We really felt like we were in a completely different world!
After the garden we walked over to the mall in search of the big grocery store. It was a gorgeous place – with the cool whale statue and fountain in the entrance!
We just price shopped at the grocery store, since there was a little store right across from the pier, and we’d prefer not to have to carry beer and wine all the way back down into town if we could get it a few feet away! We did buy some alka seltzer at the pharmacy though. The one thing we forgot! And wow! Is that sort of stuff expensive here. Even with good Euro rates – it’s crazy! But when you need it, you need it, and the ship coffee was doing a job on our stomachs that morning for some reason. So seltzer in hand, we headed back down to the port where we bought our wine (Vinho Verde – Yum!) and beer. Then back aboard for a quick light lunch.
After lunch, we wandered back out to the little café we visited the last time we were here for their great wine and beer and free internet. Ed’s iPhone actually had the server and password already saved on it! We whiled away the afternoon sipping our beverages, uploading the blog and downloading all the large files we couldn’t get on the ship.
Very nice relaxing day! Back aboard, the Captain told us that one of the thrusters had a problem and divers were trying to fix it. We ended up leaving about 3 hours late without having the problem fixed but it won’t affect the sailing – just the docking – so – off we go to Lisbon.
Another day and a half at sea (another 2 books to read!) and we’ll report more from Lisbon.
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