Planes, Trains (Trolleys), & Automobiles (& Tuk-Tuks)
Trolley outside our Lisbon apartment
If the journey is the destination and the obstacle is the path, a huge part of our path is getting from place to place. One of the things I want for the kids is for them to feel comfortable wherever they may find themselves in the world. We certainly got a huge head start on that in Portugal.
In the course of one week, we were on planes, trains, buses, trolleys, scooters, tuk-tuks, subways, and, of course, our feet.
Google maps made a lot of this much easier, but we practiced with the kids how to get a bus or subway map, find the line number of color, identify the stop we wanted, figure out which direction we wanted (named for the last stop), and plot the transfers.
Naturally in our first attempt at the bus in Porto, I led us onto a bus going the wrong way, snapped at Theresa about it, and then had to sort out a totally different way to get where we were going (another blog about that soon).
Ultimately, this was much better. We went to the Metro station, asked how to get a day pass for all the forms of transit, and practiced all the things.
A nightmare of ours collectively comes from the first chapter of the book We Came, We Saw, We Left in which the sabbaticalling family loses their children on the Bogota Metro when the doors close unexpectedly. We have been drilling about what to do in that case (if you’re a kid on the train, get off at the next stop and wait for an hour. If you get off and the adults don’t wait for an hour. Try to get on wifi and call us. If, after an hour we have not found you, find a female worker and ask for help. The kids always have the address of where we are staying either written down or on their phones).
I like public transit for the people watching. Especially in Europe’s crowded cities with expensive gas, it’s a real melting pot of humans. I also love for both the adults and the kids the awareness that sometimes you just have to wait. And sometimes it’s hot. And sometimes the train/bus/metro is late. And sometimes it’s crowded.
In our little bubble of car transit in Louisville, Kentucky we don’t really get that very human experience.
While we have plans for places to stay for the first few weeks, transit is still very much a work in progress. On the recommendation of several friends, we wanted to visit the Douro valley, famous for vineyards, amazing views, and friendly people. After our attempted tour bookings failed, we decided that it was relatively comparable to rent a car and drive to Lisbon instead of taking the train, enabling us to see the Douro, and drop by Fatima, a Catholic holy site (more on trying to explain Catholic mythology to our children at a future point).
After two reservation fails on a van big enough to hold all of us, we walked to a Eurocar location and asked about options in person. The options were…interesting.
We ended up with a French station wagon and a Fiat, both stick shifts. I don’t think I have driven a true stick in a decade. Theresa’s father Bill thought it might have been the 1970s for him. But hey, when the going gets tough, the tough figure it out.
Now, I am generally a confident driver. New York and Boston don’t bother me, and once upon a time, I happily drove across the Serbian country-side in the middle of winter and navigated tiny cliffside roads in both Italy and Croatia with a minimum of stress.
It is a totally different proposition to be doing this with your children in the car, with your father-in-law following you, and with GPS not as reliable as one would wish it to be (see above “Your GPS is lying to you, you’re about to drive off a cliff into vineyards” sign).
The switchbacks were impressive, with LOTS of opportunities to downshift to first or second gear, one memorable “skid out with the emergency brake up a nearly vertical cliff from a complete stop to the smell of burning rubber”, culminating in an arrival in Lisbon that made me thankful for all of the time I have spent playing MarioKart over the last decade.
The pictures I wish I had were of the cliff, the older woman with a cane I nearly killed, the truck backing up toward me down a hill at 30mph, the trollies that were so cute as a passanger and a menace as a driver.
But it was well worth it.
From Lisbon, we really did take the train (which involved a bus to the train station, figuring out the train station, and then realizing we had booked seats going backwards - to the chagrin of the motion-sick among us). Two kindly fellow passengers overheard us talking (as Theresa looked at the map) about getting from Faro to our apartment and told us we could get out several stops early and Uber from the train station.
To complete the full set of travel options, we ended up doing a boat tour of the Algarve coastline on a Zodiac.
Yesterday, we navigated getting COVID tests not too far from us (100 Euros each!), but we have applied for the French vaccine passport, which might make this the last test for us for a few months.
I’m writing this in the Faro airport. We’re…early. So we have time for some travel logistics (where are we going to stay in Athens?), some blogging, and some throwing the ball around a public place to burn off some energy.
Onward!
