A Heeling Time in Portugal.

After several hours sleeping on benches, we boarded the plane to Porto. Once there, I felt rather at ease hearing a language I was once somewhat familiar with in Brazil years ago, Portuguese. We spent a few hours wandering around this very old city and admiring the unique architecture and skinny coblestone street.

We spent time walking along the river and seeing the gigantic bridges over it, visiting one of the

world´s most beautiful bookstores, and enjoying a local Porto sandwich and Guarana!

The next day we hopped on a bus to Lisbon and spent a good while seeing the beautiful city centre and seeing extremely old fortresses. Also it is rumored that J.K. Rowling got her idea for the Hogwarts school uniforms in Harry Potter from the university student's uniforms in Lisbon & do we ever agree! The student's all walk around wearing long black capes and carrying some sort of wooden stick. They looked like they were all straight out of a movie. This is supposed because of the time that J.K. Rowling spent there while writing. We also saw the world´s oldest bookstore there!

From Lisbon we made a day trip to Sintra, this historic site with palaces and mansions. It was an entire old estate on the side of a hill with tonnes of caves, homes, fountains, and fancy mansions. There was also a really cool 8 story well built into

the ground with stairs all around, I really don´t know how to describe it, here´s some pictures. It was basically ruins of an estate and one of the more unique ones anywhere.

After getting back to Lisbon, we boarded a bus that took us further south to Lagos, in the Algarve. Though we didn´t know it, this is apparently one of the hottest tourist spots anywhere due to good prices, great architecture, and outstanding beaches. We were very excited to be in the same place for 4-5 days and relax on some beaches!

However, it was also the time my staph decided to make a repeat performance.

I think I must have gotten another staph infection while hiking in the Alps and my foot got a blister that wasn´t properly covered. Well, 4 days after that it really sprouted on the back of my heel! So my foot started turning red, swelling up, and getting a big grosse boil there. So we made a quick trip to the international hospital to have a doctor check it. We´d already started taking my malaria pills (doxycycline) that worked last time and she liked that idea, except said I should´t walk until it mostly healed.

So the next 3 days we hung out at our little hostel while I layed in bed. Let me tell you it was an

extremely frustrating way to spend our few days at a place with lots of heat and beautiful beaches!

Finally by the last of 4 day it had gotten a little better, so we rented a 125cc motorbike and ripped around to see some of the beaches. It was truly beautiful and some of the more incredible that we had ever seen. So although we didn´t get to enjoy them like we wanted, we were very lucky to see them at all!

That night we bussed back to Lisbon, slept in the airport again (we were really getting good at this) so we could catch an early flight to Paris!

Worlds oldest bookstore

Beautiful streets everywhere.

Sintra Palace.