Breakfast in bed started at 8:30 with marmalade, cheese, ham, and toast, with hot milk, coffee and OJ. We got ready for riding and went to the historic town center. There was a group of riders meeting, and they all rode mountain bikes which was a good sign on our choice - lots of rough cobbles and steep roads around. I got some oil on my rear brake disc which means that it's not stopping so great, even after I cleaned it. The other problem, my single missing part, was apparent on the first hill. A little spring, about 6mm long by 2mm wide was in the bottom of my bike box (the first item I found a home for was a cotter pin smaller than that which belonged to the front brake). Without the spring, I had only the harder half of my gears.
We rode up to the castle at Sintra, which was a ridiculously beautiful road, and steep. My gear was a single speed style gear, and a little overgeared at that. King Fernando II tried to make the whole place some super archicturual forest/landscape with all sorts of non-native plants. It looks like something out of fairytales that couldn't be real. The climbing was tough, and unlike South America where dogs are everywhere, it seems to be cats hanging out everywhere here. They're friendly.
We returned to hotel at 11 and showered, then I got to fixing my bike. There's only 2 holes where that spring could possibly go, so I tried one of them in the light of the parking lot where I could see it wasn't just going to drop in and get ground up in the gears. A test ride in the parking lot seems to indicate I picked right as I could shift all the gears, but time will tell. The noisy people last night taked to us in the parking lot, they were from Colorado. After pocketing a few oranges from the tree, we hit the road.
We started driving north on secondary roads, which was fun. Not much traffic, a lot of traffic cirles, and a lot of twisty roads. It's no mistake little euro cars are know for good handling, it actually gets used. I don't think the road was straight for more than 100m until we eventually got onto the main toll road.
We stopped in Obidos, which is an old town and castle built on a hill within a wall that's been around since 1282. There's still people living in the town, and there's restaurants and tourist shops. Pretty neat overall, lots of gardens and plants, a nativity scene that looked half authentic in its context in the town square, each little street was a exercise in micro architecture. We walked along the ramparts and checked out the local restored hotel, Casa d' Obidos. Apparently the ocean used to come near where it's now just fields, seems hard to believe now. There's little zoo type thing of animals around with some local mini deer. We stopped and had a toast and cheese and ham sandwich and a mini coffee in a chic bar type place with ultramodern interior despite the old exterior, while listening to remixes, notably a non-Oasis version of Wonderwall that was good. The place didn't have a name or an address above the door, although all the other doors on the street did. All in all it's touristy, but it sure earned being touristy by just being as neat as can be. I imagine that it's unpleasantly crowded in the summer, the streets are so narrow (sidewalks really). At Christmas it was cold and nice. I think a web site of the place might be www.cm-obidos.pt which I imagine would have some cool pics before I get home and can post the beautiful shots I tried to take that'll look poor and devoid of talent because it was just regular unartistic me with a pocket digicam. A sunny day there with the wide angle would be sweet.
It downpoured just as we were leaving, but we made time to get some chestnuts roasting on an open fire for the drive north. I've never had them before, so now I feel like it's an authentic Christmas (more on Christmas dinner below).
We drove to Porto in the rain, roads vary between 90 and 140km/h. Tori booked us a hotel over the phone while we were driving that's apparently historic. It's about 8 blocks from the historic town center, and was difficult to get to... Navigating in the dark, in the rain, with Portugese street signs was rather funny. Yes, we did even manage to go the wrong way down a one way street briefly... too funny.
We finally found a gate in a wall covered by grafitti that hid a few acre sprawl of a castle on a hill right in the midst of downtown buildings crammed right next to each other. Totally cool. Our room is 123, which is confusing because it's on the second floor, which is actually the third floor if you tend to count floors the way a North American would (1-2-3). I thought it might just be our first place where the door opened into the hall, but this one does too. A friendly hotel cat followed us from the car into our room and jumped up onto the bidet. I tried turning it on, and sure enough it sat and drank for 2 minutes.
We walked down to the historic part of town in search for Christmas dinner, but really we expected everything to be closed. There was a clear plastic dome set up with skating inside, looked like it'd be a fun stop if it's open tomorrow. Once we got to the main square there were lots of people around, but we couldn't figure out why as nothing was open. A church nearby was our best guess but it didn't look open. There were 6 street vendor cars operating with lots of people around so we got Christmas dinner there. We had sandwiches, which we found out were actuall hot dogs, but at first we just saw the slices of ham going in. They were topped with corn, mushrooms, shredded carrot, lettuce, and stringy style potato chips, with honey mustard, ketchup and mayonnaise. I have no idea who had the munchies when this thing was invented, but it was splendid! For dessert it was a rasperry filled churro and a chocoate filled churro.
We walked home, and turned on all the radiators in our room, it's pretty cool out. We've had two great character places to stay (they're cheap for such historic buildings, must be offseason) and a day of really interesting stuff, so we're looking forward to tomorrow.
We've got a delicious cheese, some dried figs and fresh almonds to go with the second $3ish dollar bottle of wine, so things aren't too bad.
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