Sunday, June 5, 2016

Road Trip - Day 3

Dan and I awake on Day 3 and enjoy our final amazing breakfast at Valverde Hotel. The time has come to leave behind our angelic hotel staff, with their maudlin inevitabilities of never leaving their home town, and their sweet optimism about finding love with the hot fado singer in the lobby. I try not to cry too much into the pool, because this place is beautiful and amazing and all the buildings look like giant cakes.


I think this one is blueberry.

But, as the saying goes, all good cakes must come to end, so I pack my razor and my hair ties and prepare to leave Valverde behind, to find our place in the Douro Valley.


Not before leaving a parting gift.

I decide it is polite of me to leave behind my old hair tie, to give Portugal a gift that they know nothing of. A relic from another land, where things are, perhaps not better, but different, at least when it comes to the ability to keep hair off of your head. The mystery continues for me, because Portuguese women have these bountiful heads of hair, and sometimes I see them tied back, and I just wonder do you have to make your own hair ties or what? I haven't seen a place to buy strips of leather either, so maybe it's all just prize scrunchies here. Who knows, I certainly don't, and given our new journey we are about to embark on, I also don't care.

Side note: When we were at cooking class, I was regaling everyone with my absolutely fascinating, not at all ridiculously boring tale of how I spent the entire day looking for a small bit of elastic instead of giving good regard to a country full of wonders both natural and man-made. Margo said, "Oh, why don't you ask Kaitlyn? She always has a ton." My eyes snapped right to Kaitlyn's wrist, where, sure enough, there was a veritable treasure trove of hair ties encircling her arm like tiny hugs of joy. Sweet darling of heaven that she is, she offered me one free of charge, even though I felt compelled to tell her that the going rate is 0.50E. 


Save the capitalism for America.

The point of that side note is now laden with two hair ties, Dan and I are realizing we're running out of room in our luggage. But that's okay, we are about to get a car! And then it can carry our things for us.

We have a plan perfectly laid out: we shall call a taxi, pick up the car, come back to the hotel, load our things, and be on our way. Confident in our ability to put tasks in an order that makes sense, we ask Fernand to call us a taxi to the car rental place. He looks surprised and says, "But it is such a short walk!" I trust him implicitly, because our hotel angels would never do anything to lead us astray. Dan mentions when we walk away that it seems like the walk is twenty minutes or longer, but I say that they said short walk, and if those sweet paragons of virtue and goodness at the front desk say it's a short walk, it's a short walk, dammit.

Dan says that Google maps says it's twenty minutes. I say that is probably shorter time on the metric system and before he can tell me that is not how that works we are off walking, the opposite direction up Avenida da Liberdade than we have usually been going, that is to say, up the fucking hill.


"For the millionth time, no, you will 
not die from walking."

FINE. It is a short walk, everyone in Portugal knows this, so we press on, Dan keeping a pace that makes me suspect he secretly hates me, also known as 'normal walking speed.' It is warm, and the cobblestones are out in full force, and we are going uphill, so I pray to the gods of laziness that this all ends soon. 

We pass by a Hertz rental center. Our place?! We consult the map and it does not seem to be so. I try not to fling myself at the Hertz like the last woman against the last man in a bar after all the other men have been like nevermind, I guess I prefer loneliness after all. But at this point we honestly have no idea where our rental place is. What we do know is that we are standing at the beginnings of another hill, with no way to know if our things are beyond it. To compel myself to move forward, I pretend that we are fleeing the Inquisition and that if I don't walk up the hill I will be caught by Catholics and tortured. But then that sounds nice too, so I am stuck deciding what I would prefer when Dan has the sensible idea to just walk to the end of the block and if we cannot find the place we'll grab a taxi.

So we walk another ten minutes and I continue to ponder Inquisition torture methods and whether walking was one of them until we finally come to the conclusion that we just have no idea where we are or what we are doing. We double back, consulting our map the whole way. I figure this is a good time to actually check street signs, which is very difficult in Portugal because they are only on the side of the building, and most of them are very poorly kept, I assume because the Portuguese don't really care if they ever get anywhere, life's good anyway.

I pop over to the other side of the street and look for the sign we need, and return back to Dan, whereby we discover the Hertz is actually the rental company we're looking for, even though we rented from a different company and there are no indicating factors on the building that it is what we're looking for, except for a small, so small sticker set far away from the door saying that is where we're supposed to be. 


Hertz is a black bird shitting all over my heart.

There is a brief celebration as we high-five over our unerring skills of locating, comparing ourselves to dolphins and Batman, or at least I do, at length, while Dan goes to get our car. 

He finagles an automatic in a country of standards, because he is awesome and good things always happen to him. I am pleased that he was the negotiator instead of me, because inevitably we would have ended up with some sort of airplane and I would say but I am not a pilot and they would say well you ordered this and I would say no I ordered a sandwich, seriously, what is the Portuguese word for that? But we procure instead a BMW that has a GPS and Bluetooth capabilities, which was my only request so that I could blast The Lumineers and fado music interchangeably.


Perfect for any road trip.

By the time we get our car, it has been more than an hour, much longer than the less than an hour we were expecting. So we get on the road, and it is a terrifying experience for me because Portugal does not seem to have any discernible traffic laws that we can suss out, having eschewed turn signals for sheer intuition. Lisbon driving is a delicate ballet between all the drivers who seem to know exactly who to let through and who to not, of people gunning their gas and pulling up short to wave through a pedestrian that they saw three miles away, switching lanes at seemingly ridiculous moments but being yielded to, and I have no idea where the speed limit signs are. Which means that driving in Lisbon, you need Counter-Strike levels of paying-attentioness, or you will accidentally go through the rotary at the wrong wave-through and get squished like a Portuguese banana.


Only sometimes a good thing.

Dan, of course, is just good at doing stuff, so he maneuvers us back to Valverde like he's been co-driving with Lisboans his whole life, and I pretend like we're not driving in a city-wide death trap. We get back to the hotel, load up our luggage, and say goodbye to Lisbon.


Elijah rides bitch.

For some reason, we were under the impression it took five hours to get from Lisbon to the Douro Valley, but it really only takes three. 


Just enough time for a detour.

Our first choice seems a little ominous, so we decide to stop in Sintra, which is a quaint little seaside village full of house-cake confections and lots of castles. 


Another good place to put a castle.

Two things become apparent in Sintra: 

1. The class system made it possible to build these amazing structures in improbable places, because when human lives are not valued, who cares how many hills you send them up with how many stones? 
2. It's not a seaside town.

I will take this moment to say that I have tried tirelessly to procure a guidebook on Portugal, but only after I already arrived and the possibilities were next to zero to do so. Therefore much of my knowledge of Portugal is based on a general idea of what the country is shaped like (a rectangle), and historical fiction in which Portugal might be shipping over a princess to marry the hot English prince but he just wants to be freeeee! 

So, you know, more than some, less than others. 

It is the exact opposite of the way I usually travel, which is to research heavily the entire plane ride over and land with a good understanding of where I am and what I should be doing. This, on the other hand, has been a singularly strange experience, to be in a country with no knowledge of the language, culture, sights, amount of hills, and location of the ocean. It is like you are in middle school again and all of the things you have learned in life are no longer true and you're wearing the wrong things and saying the wrong words and having absolutely no idea any of those things are true until days later when that weird look someone gave you finally slides into place and you realize ohhh, it's because they thought I was a fucking idiot, well that makes sense.

Which is how I came to think Sintra was a seaside town, because all of the buildings were high up, and the only reason to build things that high is if they are on a cliff, probably overlooking the ocean. But they are not on cliffs, they are on hills (of course) and we are going to climb those hills because looking at things from high up is how you enjoy yourself in Portugal.


The iron maidens were under construction.

Happy fortunes mean Eric and Margo and their family are in Sintra the same day as us, so we all plan to climb the Castelo dos Mouros together, because every experience I've had with a Moorish castle has been varied and unique. I am of course kidding, they are all very high up and require a lot of walking and one would think at this point I know myself well enough to know that hanging out at the bar at the bottom is a much more unique experience, but learning is not the theme of this trip. If it were, I would have consulted Wikipedia for this picture and noped right the fuck out of there.


There's a bar at the top too, right?

Instead, I yep right the fuck up there, following my feet in the hot sun to take this picture.


Majestic.

We waffle around in the sun at the top of the Moorish castle, because the alternative is walking down, and that just seems like a lot to ask. I read a plaque that says the castle was not defensive, it was just a lookout, so the Moors did much as we are doing, which is just standing around and staring, hoping that's all you have to do for the rest of the day, I guess. I imagine the Moors had more turnips and shit to snack on up there, which would have been a nice treat at the top of that godforsaken hike, but very little looks edible. 


Pretty sure feral cat is a delicacy here.

Hungry and confused, I begin my dubious descent down the castle steps, which are made for people much more adept at movement than I am. I wonder how anyone wearing jerkins and boots could even maneuver on this, but maybe back then their feet were not as big as mine. I consider that maybe pitching myself off the top of a staircase would mean I would not have to walk down, because either I would bounce to the bottom or be dead.


Either way is fine.

Though both seem like valid and very adult options to pursue, three children and three other adults are making their way down the steps, so I figure I am able to do so too. We reach the bottom and ask Eric and Margo what they are doing, and they say they are visiting the palace that was the first thing I saw and took a picture of on top of a hill. 

I say a silent prayer for their walking souls. 

Dan says the single most beautiful words I've ever heard, those being, "We're going to get lunch instead." With a song in my heart and a sandwich on my mind, we head back to the car and continue our journey.

Our plan had been to get lunch in Sintra, but the insane warren of hillish backstreets upon which many a tourist has parked means that there is absolutely no place to put our new BMW, so we drive out of town and toward the Douro Valley along some highway. About ten minutes outside of Sintra proper, I see a parking spot and a cafe, and we quickly stop for some food.

It is essentially the recreation of our experience at O Beny's, only this place is called Blitz Cafe. I make a note to never enter anywhere with a B in the name again. This time I have my stock phrase (falas ingles?) and employ it handily. The girl looks at me and says, "No." 

WELL FUCK I DID NOT PREPARE FOR THIS EVENTUALITY.

I say the only words on the menu I know, which are 'ham and cheese sandwich,' although that once got me an omelette, so I pray it does not happen again. Dan seconds my order, and she says, "Two?" and I nod and she stares at me like I'm an idiot, so I keep nodding, because that always fills people with confidence about one's intelligence. She shrugs and puts the order in, and then we get this.


That's two sandwiches, twice.

What happened here, I like to believe, is that this woman saw the desperate look of hunger on my face, and realized somewhere, somehow, Portugal had shorted us one sandwich (possibly in exchange for an omelette, which is no exchange at all). And as such, it was her honor-bound duty to supply us with enough sandwiches, commensurate with the looks of tragedy and idiocy crossing my face. Dan, who always looks normal, got one sandwich. I, who looks like PLEASE FEED ME all the time, got three.

I ain't even mad. I fucking love sandwiches.

We eat our tostas and get on the road. Time is a'wastin' and we have a Douro Valley to get to. 


If Florida and Montana had a baby.

I try very hard to stay awake, but that seems like a bad idea, so I fall asleep instead. When I wake up, Dan is struggling desperately to not kill us by falling asleep at the wheel. We think some coffee is in order, but given our failed experiences everywhere that is not a city proper, we are uncertain about pulling over in a small town to find an espresso. 

It eventually becomes a physical necessity to pull over though, and fortunately there are along Portuguese highways little service areas that are right on the road and do not necessitate actually going into a town. We pull off, and don't even need to use any of our terrible Portuguese to get by, because there is this magical robot available.


Tell me what you desire, I'll pee it out.

Robot excretions in hand, we get back on the road. After lengthy discussions wherein I force Dan to unpack every poetic implication of every Lumineers song, we come upon the Douro Valley. 

To describe coming up on the Douro Valley is like trying to describe a particularly good piece of chocolate cake. You can't do it. Why? Because your mouth is full of cake. But also because it's just brilliant, beautiful, unimaginably vast and surreal. So here's this video instead:



Someone tell Morgan Freeman 
his narration days are over.

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