skysworldadventures

I snuck out for a run again this morning.  Although it was beautiful and I took a bunch of pictures, the ones I took later in the day far outshone my morning phone snapshots.  Here is the one that I think is share worthy. Yay phone panorama picture thingy!  If you look closely, you can see the castle at the top of the hill.  The thing in the front with the two large cones (chimneys) is the Sintra National Palace.  After clean up time and breaky, we decided to walk up that really large hill to the castle on the top.  There is an amazing pedestrian only path that goes all the way up to the Moorish castle.  The first half of it is through the Vila Sassetti Garden.  It was an amazingly beautiful walk.  The plants and gardens are lovely.  There was a small waterfall, some interesting buildings, restroom stops, places to buy a coffee, anything a person could want while hiking to a castle.  If we had more time in Sintra, ...

Managed to drag myself out of bed this morning for an amazingly punishing 5 mile run.  It was crazy steep downhill or crazy steep uphill with absolutely nothing flat.  I guess that is your option when running form a ancient fortress town.  The up side was that it was a beautiful morning and it was a lovely view (by my legs are saying this is so much worse than anything I've subjected them to in a long time and I run a fair number of hills at home). After a little shower and breakfast, we did one more loop of the town and headed to Almourol, it is a lovely castle that is in a river and unless the water level is really low, you need a boat to get to it.  We had lunch looking at the castle but apparently we had bad timing because the guys who rent the boats took a lunch break when we were finishing lunch and we couldn't get across.  We had a bigger driving day today so we decided to not wait for them which was a shame but the right call for Wren. We ...

I had planned on running this morning through the vineyards but after all of last night's wine, I decided sleeping in sounded like a better plan.  I did walk around the winery and take a couple more pictures.  It was a lovely place to stay and I wish we had been able to stay a second night, but there is a lot more of Portugal to see! Our first stop of the day was Sabugal.  It was getting to be lunch time so we stopped and had some delicious francesinha which is bread, steak, ham, sausage, bread and sunny side up egg on top all covered in a sauce and surrounded by french-fries.  It doesn't sound that great, but it was amazing.  The town also had a castle that was unique because it has a tower that is constructed with 5 sides.  Our next stop was Sortelha.  It was a beautifully preserved stone town.  There was a village in that location prior to the romans and the walls and the castle were built in the 1200's so there is a wide range...

Dear blog readers, I have had wine and wine and port and I'm not sure how good this post is going to be.  Portuguese internet had been consistently crappy so far which means it takes me roughly 2 hours to upload pictures in order to do these blog posts if I refresh every 5 minutes.  I'm not a patient person and this is honestly really starting to piss me off so if you don't see a blog post tomorrow it's because the internet is even worse than the amazingly crappy internet that I've had so far. Today started out with a rental car debacle that I am choosing to not go into.  The important part of the story is that we went from Porto to the Douro river valley (wine region) today and got a later start than we really wanted to. The good parts version is we had an amazing lunch at a restaurant were you pretty much get to choose from the 2 dishes they are making that day and the authentic Portuguese grandma will make lunch for you.  It was amazing and with a g...

Wren slept through the night so I got up and went for a run again this morning.  It was a beautiful morning and it was really nice to get out before the crowds.  There are definitely more today and Saturday than there was on Friday.  I started along the river going the opposite direction this time (inland).  I did a little out and back by the other 5 bridges that Porto is known for, the 6th bridge I have a picture of on the first post.  I saw a lot of cyclists and other runners out but very few cars or tourists. Maybe that's too many bridge pictures, but I had a hard time choosing a favorite and Jeff liked a different one than me.  I then ran up a LOT of stairs to get back to the top of the town.  The lighting was great so I took another roof top picture. I then headed over towards the 18-th century part of town (the oldest parts are 13th-16th century along the river).  This area was really crowded yesterday evening bu...