After the great success of the Thanksgiving trip to Paris last year, we decided we should take another trip with our friend Ami (“Dubbs”). We looked long and hard at Barcelona, but in the end we could not get a direct flight there, so we started to look at alternatives. Amsterdam came up, but by far the cheapest flight was to Lisbon, Portugal. We decided that going somewhere none of us had ever been before was attractive, and the fact that Lisbon in late November tends to be in the high 60’s and low 70’s helped the decision along. Lisbon it was.

As always, we flew out of Toronto. Toronto is a bit of a pain due to the the six-hour drive, but the cost of airline tickets is about half that of tickets out of any U.S. airport, and they have lots of direct flights to Europe, which we prefer; it reduces complexity when you don’t have to worry abut connecting flights.

Our flight was scheduled to leave at 9:15, so I figured three hours at the airport (in case security was backed up), a six-hour drive, and two extra hours for traffic or a backup at the Canadian border. So, we got up at 7:00 am and Dubbs picked us up at 10:00 am. We were off! We made good time, even with stopping for a quick lunch, and so we got to the border slightly ahead of schedule. We got in line, but when we were second to go, the line stopped moving, and then they eventually closed our lane. Happily, Dubbs is a…persuasive…driver, and we got over to the next lane, and so got through the border in under twenty minutes total.

There were no traffic issues, and so we were parked and unloading by 4:00, right on schedule. We took the train to the airport, walked up to the counter to see about checking bags, and discovered that they could not take bags until three hours before the flight, or 5:15. Ooops. We found chairs and puttered around for an hour, and then checked our bags.

The security line looked long, but then I realized it was just a back-up for the first checkpoint, where they check your passport and boarding passes. They checked mine, and then asked me to step aside for a random chemical swab test, so all three of us waited for them to do the test, which I passed. Being Canadian, the security person was very polite, and then told us to take the NEXUS (pre-approved) fast lane through security. We breezed past a half-hour wait (or more).

As a result, we got to out gate at 6:00, a little over three hours early. These things happen when you travel with a Riordan. We grabbed supper, and then sat near the gate, reading and grading papers. On top of our being there early, the flight got in to Toronto late, so our outgoing flight was delayed by about an hour. I guess we could have slept in until 7:15 instead of 7:00.

The flight was less than half full, so after we were in the air I got to try stretching out across a middle row of three seats to try to sleep. It turns out that folding a six-foot frame into a four-foot space is challenging, especially when the seats are designed as seats and not as a bed. Still, I was able to sleep fitfully for about four hours of the six-and-a-half-hour flight. The flight itself was a tad bumpy a couple of times, but it was fine and smooth most of the time.

We got good views of the coast as we flew in, and the land was splashed with sunshine. We knew it was supposed to be warm sunshine, but it is hard to process that when you leave Toronto in a forty-degree rain. The palm trees we saw outside the airport helped convince us.

We had to wait over forty minutes for the airport bus to take us downtown, which was a bit of a drag, since we knew it was delaying our napping time. As we got on the bus, Dubbs accidentally whacked a woman in the nose with her backpack, and in the ensuing apologies, we got to chatting with the whacked woman, who turned out to be a nice older woman from Bath, England. It was an odd way to meet someone, but she was a lot of fun to chat with.

We got off the bus in a large square right on the huge tidal river of the city, the Tejo (Tagus) River. It is wide enough in Lisbon that I thought it was a small bay. We made our way to our apartment for the week, about a ten-minute walk, and grabbed a three-hour nap. Mer wanted a quick shower afterwards, so we were ready to go explore Lisbon around 5:00.

Mer wanted to follow a walking tour laid out in our Lisbon tour guide, which was written by the always-present Rick Steves. That got us started back in the square facing the river, just at sunset, overlooking the huge bridge across the water, and with the Brazil-like Christ statue looking down over the town from the hill on the far side. It was spectacular. Lisbon agreed – the place was packed, but in a low-key, taking-it-easy sort of way. We walked along the river to get to the real start of our walking tour, the huge Commerce Square.

Commerce Square was a main entrance to the city from the river at one point, and the square is the biggest we saw today, but the people of Lisbon do not hang out in it much. There was activity, with cafes and taxi stands and bus stops and such, but it was not a place people were lingering. There was a packed restaurant sitting on one corner, and as we were getting ready to leave the square, I saw a cafe. We checked it out as a place to eat, and it was very agreeable – good food and lots of outside seats facing the square. We loved sitting outside on November 19th. Life seems very good when you are eating outside on a European square.

After supper, the tour continued. We walked up the main shopping district, which is pedestrian only, and we saw several street performers, including a man playing musical saws, and an excellent cello player. We grabbed some dessert from a store, and ate it on the steps of a church on a small square just off the shopping district. We crossed a couple of more good-sized squares, got to see the Moorish-inspired facade of the train station, ducked into a very swanky hotel where we got to hear a piano player in the lounge, and finished off walking along part of the Lisbon imitation of Paris’ Champs-Élysées – a large boulevard lined by shops and trees. After that, we headed back home, a walk of about a mile, getting back around 8:00. Getting in a four-hour touring day on the first day, especially with the sunset and dinner on the square, was wonderful.