Category: travel
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As the fish turns
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Winter Break in Portugal
Our winter trip to Portugal seems so long ago…I guess because it’s been five months! To trick the kids into writing journal during the trip I kept a journal myself. Thanks to pandemic boredom, here it is!
13 and 14 December 2019: Dulles to Lisbon
We caught the TAP 232 red eye flight from Dulles to Lisbon. I didn’t sleep much but I did get to watch Detective Pikachu and most of a Portuguese drama so that was good. The kids were mostly okay on the flight – it was just a little longer than a flight to Seattle so not outside our experience really. We made it through a pretty long line at passport control and then breezed through customs.
We all crammed into a minivan taxi and headed straight to the Airbnb apartment in Bairro Alto. It was a bit of a struggle getting all of the bags up the stairs but we found the apartment clean and nice with plenty of space for all of us. We hit the street and headed down the hill to the mall to find Vodafone for SIM cards. We had lunch along the way at a tiny cafe, a two-person operation where one was a toddler watching cartoons. I had garlic shrimp, which were very salty and good. Mandi and Mike got their phones working but Bette’s turned out to be locked. She got it working days later, but it took a lot of talking to AT&T. On our way up the hill we grabbed some snacks and headed to the apartment to try to avoid sleeping as long as possible – we did okay.
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Quick Seattle trip
A week or so ago we went to Seattle to visit our friends who just had a baby. I always tell people that Seattle isn’t as rainy as they think – just a bit gray in the winter – so of course we arrived during a rare stretch of heavy rain. I guess I should say that Seattle is not always really rainy in the winter, but might sometimes be really rainy.
Between cooking dinner and meeting up with as many other friends and family as possible, we made it to most of our favorite spots in Seattle. We had dinner at Mashiko, easily the best sushi restaurant in the whole world. We had breakfast at Le Pichet on our way to go shopping at Pike Place Market. We had coffee at Caffe Ladro, maybe still my favorite coffee shop.
We tried a couple of new things thanks to friends. We had coffee at Caffe Fiore in Ballard, where the espresso is possibly as good as Caffe Ladro. After Mashiko we went to Shelter Lounge, which had great beer and bar food. We met some friends for dinner at Mission in West Seattle, which had excellent adobo pork.
We mostly just walk around Pike Place Market looking at stuff, rarely buying anything. For real shopping we head down the hill a street to World Spice Merchants, where we get spice mixes and chai. We also like The Spanish Table and their new sister store Paris Grocery.
That was about it for this trip to Seattle. I wish we’d been able to stay longer and visit with more people. It was a hard to leave, but the monsoon that greeted us on arrival did make it a little easier.