Last night I walked back into old Sintra for some dinner. It’s a bit less than a mile, and downhill towards town. By the time I got there, almost all of the tourists were gone and almost all of the restaurants were closed. I found a small place, had a mediocre meal, and then walked back in the dark.

Today was our full day in the Sintra region. So after a full breakfast at the hotel, we got back in the car with Jorge and headed out. We were scheduled for a half day tour – first a stop at an old palace and gardens, and then a seaside lunch.

The first stop was Monserrate Palace, a short drive from the hotel. Jorge explained that our plan, which most people followed, was to first walk to the Palace itself and spend about 45 minutes there, and then optionally walk around the gardens, which are beautiful and could take another half hour or so. Our lunch reservation was timed according to this plan.

But somehow we got lost shortly after leaving the entrance to the estate and wound up walking through a good part of the gardens. Which was fine, except that it involved walking into a deep valley and not knowing how to find the Palace itself. When we at the very bottom, we found a gardener who pointed us in the right direction, which was uphill. By the time we got to the Palace after more than 45 minutes, we were both pretty hot and tired.

The Palace was originally built by someone in the 18th century, and bought by Francis Cook, a wealthy Englishman in the mid-19th century. He refurbished it to be a summer home for his family. The government acquired the property in 1949.

The Palace itself is a magnificant building with no furnishings. So while the architecture was interesting, merely looking at pencil illustrations of how the furnishings might have looked was meh. We spent all of 15 minutes in the Palace, and I looked in all of the accessible rooms. The walls were ornate, the ceilings very fancy, and every room looked the same. The only way you could distinguish the Living Room (where the ladies hung out) from the Billiards Room (for the gents) was the sign in the middle of the rooms.

As I mentioned, we were tired by the time we reached the Palace, and the 15 minutes there didn’t really give us time to fully recover. Jorge had mentioned that they ran a shuttle to the Palace from the entrance, so after starting the climb back we called him and asked him to send it down. Unfortunately, it was 12:15 and the driver was out to lunch. So our choice was waiting 45++ minutes, or attempting to finish the walk out. It turned out to only be about 20 minutes back to the entrance, and much less strenuous than the climb from the depths of the garden to the Palace.

After expressing our displeasure, we headed off to lunch. This was at a seafood restaurant overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and a small beach (1). The view was impressive, and the staff very friendly and accomodating. Sally enjoyed her Tiger shrimp, while I forced down some tuna steak.

When we got back to our room, housekeeping was cleaning the room and had removed our space heater. After some heated (2) discussion, the head of housekeeping swore that the engineers had just finished repairing the building’s heating system, and asked us to wait a while to see if the radiators in our room were in fact heating up. As I’m writing this, it’s been about two hours and it’s still blowing room-temperature air into the room.

We hung around the room the rest of the afternoon, as we were pretty tired both from jet lag and our hill-walking at Monserrate. In the evening there was a wedding in a ballroom just down the hall from us, but it ended early and the noise wasn’t too much of a burden.

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(1) This is only the second time I recall seeing the Atlantic from its eastern side, with the first being last year in Casablanca.

(2) See what I did here?