Thursday April 28 Lisbon

What happened to Wednesday? We left home at 5:30AM yesterday, Wednesday, to begin the long trek to Lisbon, Portugal. We met up with most of our group, fiddled with boarding passes, luggage tags, etc. We left Boise on time on United for the 3 ½ hour flight to Chicago...totally uneventful. Nice lunch at an Italian place in the concourse, then off to the Lufthansa gate. We boarded a giant Boeing 747 and left Chicago at about 4:00PM....again, totally uneventful, but not without irritations. My movie screen would work only erratically and both of our overhead reading lights were completely misdirected to be worthless. They did serve us a pretty nice dinner!

So we spent about 8+ hours in there, wishing it would be over. Sleeping is futile; its was only 4 o'clock! You can tell you're getting close because the sun's coming up! We arrive in Frankfurt at about 7:00AM local time. We grab a scone for a mid-morning snack and then off to another Luftansa flight for the final leg to Lisbon, another 3+ hours.

We arrive unscathed in Lisbon by about 11:00AM local time, retrieve our baggage and meet our tour guide for the half hour ride to the hotel. By then its 1:00 and the rooms aren't ready yet. So, since we were starving, we asked around and found our way to a delightful cafe called “Picasso Cafetaria”. I had a traditional Portugese dish called Cozido de Portugal and a great beer called Tulipe.

The weather is wonderful! Sunny and low 70s. Spring is in Lisbon! We finally got into our room by 3:00PM. We had been traveling for almost 26 hours and yesterday, Wednesday, is gone forever.

Our hotel is called the Avani. It's modern enough but lacks some things. The shower is downright dangerous (never seen a square tub/shower, toilet) and the coffee maker is terrible. We will be staying here for two nights.

At our dinner with the group of 24 this evening we should be able to get better acquainted. Most of our group comes from the Twin Falls area. My guess is that most of them have been farmers; We are all in our 70s and 80s.

Three other travel groups joined us for dinner tonight, making a total of about 60 people in this special event room on the second floor of this old building attached to the hotel. (It reminded me of the Oneonta Elk's Club). We were served a nice beef dish by a very competent staff! The wine was excellent. We enjoyed our table of 8 recollecting all the trips and experiences we'd had over the years. Boy, many of these people are unbelievable travelers; they've been everywhere!

Tomorrow we start with a motor coach tour of the city.

Very dangerous shower/tub

View from our room