With my being employed again after my year in school last year, we decided we could afford to travel for Thanksgiving break again. Portugal turned out to have cheap tickets for a direct flight out of Toronto, so here we are.

Getting here was fairly smooth, with the only hitch being a one-hour delay for the plane to  take off. Since we had a direct flight that was scheduled to get in at 6:45 am, a delay didn’t matter all that much.

We got to Lisbon and picked up our car after dealing with some very friendly rental agents. Mer directed me to put the town of Obidos into out GPS, and off we went.

Meredith picked Obidos as a day-one excursion based on the facts that the town sounded cute to explore on foot and that it was only forty-five minutes north of Lisbon. Although we’re focusing on the south of the country on the trip, Obidos won a spot based on those recommendations.

And it was a great pick. I got off the highway, turned a corner, and boom, there was castle. And a good what-the-movies-teach-you-to-expect kind of castle with crenellated walls sitting atop a hill. The walls were forty feet tall or more in places and enclosed a small town inside the still-existent walls.

But cute always comes with a cost. In trying to find our just-outside-the-walls hotel, I had to drive up narrow one-way cobblestone streets that somehow the medieval designers didn’t make for automobiles. Short-sighted urban planners. I finally found my way out of the maze and parked at the base of the castle hill to walk up, but there were some jet-lag-accentuated stressful moments.

We dropped our bags at the hotel around 10:00 am and were told our room would be ready around 1:00. That gave us three hours to explore Obidos properly, which is just about the right amount of time to see the inside-the-walls part of the town.

We made our way up to the main gate in time to see the storming of the gates by at least three bus tours. The town never stood a chance. Back when the Moors had the castle complex, the Portuguese king took the castle by assaulting the front gate while a group of his men sneaked up the back of the castle while using the obvious tactic of dressing as cherry trees. If you can’t trust the Ents, who can you trust?

The touristic hordes didn’t have tree disguises, but they did have pocketbooks and wallets, and the town was running a full-fledged counter-attack assault on savings accounts. This took the form of the always-required children’s plastic armor and swords that are found in castle towns all across Europe, but the main street was pitching the local Portuguese liquor, Ginja, a cherry-flavored drink served in little chocolate cups for 1.50 euros. Mer even tried some at a bakery we stopped at for lunch. She proclaimed the liqueur to suggest she was drinking cough syrup until she could actually eat the chocolate cup, at which point the cherry flavor complemented the chocolate nicely.

We did a Rick-Steves-guidebook walking tour of the town, which took us up to the main gate tower and then back down to the ground and down a quieter restaurant street before plunging us into the merchant melee of the shopping gauntlet. But it was a cute gauntlet, I have to say, and we did grab lunch on it (as well as Mer’s aperitif). There were a couple of church squares, one of which was the sunning spot of a cute tiger kitty, and we made our way up to the old church in front of the old keep of the castle, which is now a luxury hotel. The church is now a bookstore, which is appropriate since Obidos has a literary festival every year.

We went up to the hotel/keep to observe the town from a vantage point, and then we went back down before scaling the western wall. The sort-of stairs were posted with a sign telling you this could be a dumb decision, and they weren’t kidding. There were the battlements on top of the wall to keep you safe from the enemy below, but that gravity thing was clearly someone else’s problem. On the town side, the wall had no rails, and the top of the wall was just uneven enough to keep you guessing. The wall was about four feet wide, which was good, but if you were to fall, the consequences would be grim in many places as you dropped thirty feet onto cobblestone. I can only imagine how fun all of that would be if you were wearing armor or carrying pots of oil to pour on hostile people below.

We made it back to the main gate and went back down to the streets to take a quiet residential street near the western wall. That got us back to the north side of town, and we went back down the hill to our hotel, where we finally got to get into our room for a three-hour nap and a wonderful-feeling shower.

Thus refreshed, we went back out into the Obidos evening. The tour buses had all gone, and so when we went up the gate tower and walked the eastern wall, we had the walk all to ourselves. We did use my cellphone flashlight to keep an eye out for trip hazards, but we were fine. The town was all lit up, including all of the battlements along the wall. It was a pretty place to walk.

After the wall got us to the northern end of town, we strolled back along the closing-up shopping street to the main gate and got supper at a pizza restaurant outside the wall, where Mer got rice and bass, as one does at a pizza place.

After supper, we took the quieter restaurant street inside the walls to the north end of town, and back out and down to the hotel. We sat on a swinging chair on the patio for a few minutes, glad that the porch had a roof since it was raining lightly. Then, we finally called it a day.

And a great first day it was. We got some sleep and some food, and thoroughly did a major tourist site. That makes for a grand opening to our Portuguese adventure.