Tag: Tavira

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.