Daytrip to Sintra
The journey to Sintra took 45 minutes over rough mountain roads, and the bus did part of the journey twice as it tried to visit several villages on the way! Dan fell asleep but the bus was so bumpy that he fell asleep with his head over the front of the seat, and his arm outstretched to the chair in front to stop him
falling off, I don’t know how he did it ! Nigel moved him to a more comfortable place. We arrived and had to take a second bus to get to the Pena Palace on top of a nearby hill, so we stopped for lunch at Pizza Hut(!) by the station. Dan was still asleep through the entire lunch, he doesn’t know we had pizza.
Luckily they had a good salad bar and I got a takeaway salad portion for 2.5 Euros which was quite generous and was plenty enough for Dan’s lunch and tea! After the second bus we arrived at the Pena Palace. Another 12 Euros bought us tickets into the gardens and palace, and a further 3 Euros to get on the small bus up the final hill to the palace itself. It was a fairytale palace although in need of some TLC, and inside we saw all the rooms fully furnished in their original style, very sumptuous!
Later we went to the Toy Museum and a playground, then we found a Moroccan market, or rather the drum beat led us towards it! There were belly dancers and jugglers which Dan and Nigel enjoyed, and lots of stalls with ethnic products. We got the bus back to Cascais, via a more civilised route, although we still passed the same place twice!
We had a few interesting moments on the narrow twisting roads back, firstly when we rounded a hairpin bend in the large bus to face a series of four cars waiting to round the corner the other way. The first car should have reversed up a bit to let us round, but it turned out to be a woman who couldn’t reverse! Firstly she reversed right across the road into the wall, then she drove forward and made a better attempt but bumped the car behind her! The man from the car behind got out, luckily he saw she was thoroughly stressed and he offered to reverse her car for her! Then as he drove the car back and forward the bus drove on, however the man’s own car was also too far into the road. The bus driver had trapped the man inside the car which he had helped to move, there was so little room that he couldn’t get out of either side, and his wife in the car behind was obviously also incapable of driving their car. So the bus driver had to go even further forward so that the man could drive the first car right past the bus, get out, run back up the road to his own car, which he could not get into from his side because the bus was in the way, so his wife got out, he got in the passenger side to cross to the drivers side, then his wife got in, and finally he managed to reverse a little and pull in so the bus could finish going up the road. I hope that sort of event doesn’t happen often, but on those roads it probably does!
We finished off the expensive day by going for a Chinese in the shopping complex at Cascais, followed by a visit to the supermarket.