Lisbon - yeah or nah?

Lisbon was never a place I was excited to go to.  Nothing in its dark history was enticing me to go, but in order to break up the long journey down the coast we did a couple of days in Lisbon.  Our accommodation will be forever remembered as the cabbage house.  Everytime we would come back to the place it stank of old smelly cabbage.

Our first night we found a local restaurant in the old city called Little Shanghai and had dinner.  It was the local watering hole, so a lively bunch of people on a Sunday evening.  The owners took a shine to Zach and Kaia and they left smiling with the gift of ice cream for the walk home.

I planned to get us out of the city and visit an area called Sintra.  I did a bit of research, and looking at the costs of the tours, decided that I would cut out the middle person and we could navigate the two palaces and gardens ourselves on foot.

Turns out the walk between Quinta del Regaleira and Pena Palace is a hiking track not a leisurely stroll, and I bow down to my kids who were hot, tired and hiking all uphill that they ponied up and walked a half marathon in 27 degree heat on this day.

I am alone in loving Regaleira over Pena.  Regaleira is like a gothic inspired palace with an initiation well where you can descend down and end up underground, coming out by a waterfall.  This also comes with mosquitoes - and it turns out Lisbon is riddled with mozzies.

The rest of the gang were all in favour of Pena.  Again we had timed tickets and had made a plan on when we thought we needed to leave Regaleira, allowing about 45 mins for the walk up the hill.  Unfortunately, that estimate was woefully inadequate.  The Palace itself is situated on the top of a hill in the middle of a 200 hectare Park.  When working out how long it would take to walk there we looked at the Park itself rather than the Palace.  The second fail of the day was our lack of understanding of just how high up the hill it was.  As we were just about to start the walk up we could see another castle called the Moorish Castle and were commenting on how happy we were that we hadn’t gotten tickets to that one as it was so high up… How wrong we were, after eating up the entire 45 mins we’d allowed for the full walk, puffing and panting up the goat like hiking trail we passed the Moorish castle and kept going for about another 30 mins that were required until we finally got to Pena.  When we looked it up later we saw it was 490m higher in altitude than Regaleira and looking down from the Palace when we finally made it around we could see the Moorish castle half way down the hill.

After spending all day out, we made it to the Rua Augusta Arch, had an early dinner by the square and took a bolt home which happened to be a Tesla.  Interesting watching the kids try to figure out how to open the doors.  As the French Open is currently on, the driver had his mobile live streaming it, so I'm in two minds now about the ability of self-driving cars, as there seemed to be more focus on watching the tennis than the road.

We knew our 2nd day had to be on the go slow, and more focused on the kids after getting them to indulge my palace tour the day before.  So off to the Lisboa de Oceanarium and wow what an amazing place.  If you are into marine life, conservation, and getting up close with sharks, devil rays and sunfish (yep sunfish!!) This is a must do activity.  The Otters were Kaia’s fav, while everything in the big tank was Zach’s.  Gareth was happy getting to watch the Devil rays (which I thought would be my fav until I saw the sand tiger shark. 

We are definitely pacific people.  Putting the whanau close to nature and marine life, there is this calm that suddenly comes over us all, for a couple of hours, we aren’t at war with each other.

On our last night for dinner, we walked down to the cafe, but unfortunately it's closing.  We walk around the block, all the restaurants are closed, “the hangry” is setting in, and after dismissing the kid's request for Little Shanghai, it's where we end up 20 mins later.  And it's so cool to be welcomed back like a local.  We have a chat with a lady who wants to comment on how awesome our kids are, and after the yelling, complaints, meltdowns we have had on this trip (oh so many!!) It was really nice to hear those kind words.  Again the owners gifted ice cream to the kids and all was well with the world.