Chuck's News: Day 15 - Hiking the Fisherman Trail - Day 12 - The Finish Line, So Sad!

We finish the Fishermen Trail today. In Luz, we only 6 miles from the lighthouse on the point at Lagos, the end of the trail. Officially, some say the end of the trail is the trail station in Lagos, but for us, it will be the lighthouse on the point. Who ever heard of fishermen walking to a train station?

We have a bus to catch to Lisbon at 2:15 today. We only have 6 miles to cover, yet we both wanted to get an early start. The extra time allows us to not feel pushed so we can stop and enjoy beautiful spot on the route.

The hotel was to serve us breakfast, but we wanted to leave at 7:00am and breakfast didn’t start until 7:30am. They offered to pack us a lunch, which we picked up at the front desk as we left this morning. We had to backtrack down the hill 1/2 mile to the shoreline to get back on the trail. The wind had stopped overnight and the sun shone through a slight haze as it rose out of the Atlantic in the east.

We had one “big” climb this morning of about 300’ over the hill to the east of town. From the top we had a wonderful view back to Luz and forward to the point of Lagos. The trail stayed right on the bluff’s edge nearly all the way with villas just inland of us.

We dropped to sea level and enjoyed a park bench snack before climbing up onto the point in Lagos. The approach to the point is all upscale houses which eventually give way to open parkland with a boar walk all the way to the point. Surrounding the boardwalk an multiple footpaths worn in by people wanting to get closer to the convoluted cliff face.

We took a number of photos and selfies at end of the point, one for each point of the compass, then began the 2 mile walk to the bus station in Lagos. We passed a cafe on the point and stopped for a soda and decided to call for an Uber to take us to the bus station. €3.90. Too cheap to ignore.

Once in town we tried to buy bus tickets from Lisbon to Portó. The man in the ticket booth told us we would have to do that in Lisbon. Weird. We have tried to buy them online, but a Portuguese ID number is required and their zip codes are 4 numbers, a hyphen and then 3 numbers. These two fields stop us from buying bus tickets on the Rede bus website.

We decided to walk to the TI office and see if they could help us. It is not reasonable that foreigners can’t buy tickets because they lack local zip codes and ID numbers. They said it was a common problem and told us to just enter 232323232 in ID field and add 2 zeros to our zip code. It worked!!

We boarded our bus to Lisboa at 2:15 and arrived in Lisboa a little after 6:00pm. The bus terminal is also the train and metro terminal. We boarded the red line for eight stops, then boarded the blue line for three stops and exited on the main commercial avenue of Lisbon, Avenue Liberdade. We are spending the night at Erica’s flat.

This is the very ritzy district of Lisbon. We checked two restaurant menus and saw dinners for €145 euros. We got below the avenue and found a pizza counter for €10. Delicious. A couple items at the adjoining grocery and we were on our way to Erica’s, only a block away. But what a block. A very steep and narrow (one car wide) lane rising up the hill. We read the door numbers on our way up, finding number 5 very near the top. I sent a text to Erica telling her we thought we were outside her door. The door latch buzzed and we entered a stairway/entryway. Up five floors and we reached Erica’s rooftop apartment. Very Cool!! Small and funky but so cozy and functional. She has two balconies, both with views out over the city, but the south one looked across the Tejo river and across the downtown Biaxa district. We had tea and talked for a little more than an hour. We were pooped and Erica was hoping to go out -it was Saturday night after all. Erica headed out the door and Sally and I oozed into bed.