5/30: day 4 (first official day of the VBT trip)

Today was the first official day of the VBT trip.

5/30: Day 1 and warm up ride

We had breakfast as usual and we were instructed to leave our bags in front of our rooms by 8:15. We would meet in the lobby @8:55. Here's the boyz schmoozing with some of the other members of our group.

On this particular trip, we travelled with our luggage. The earlier deadline was just so the hotel staff could collect our luggage and bring it down to load on the bus. Sometimes there are two vehicles, one for the luggage and a different one for the travelers. Since there was one bus today, we watched them load our luggage and the same guy who picked us up at the airport went with us on the bus to Evora.

I enjoy planning and trips in particular present an interesting logistical challenge. I like to think I could do it and maybe even do it cheaper. For example, in my work life, constructing syllabi is one of the more enjoyable parts of course preparation.

Traveling with VBT has changed me. Not only have I been disabused of the notion that I could do it better and cheaper, but why bother? I don't have to think about anything. Luggage moves. Busses show up. Meals are served. The bikes appear and disappear. However, I still have to brush my own teeth.

We arrived at a small village and did a bike fitting and orientation in a small restaurant.

Here's David, one of our guides. These guys (and sometimes gals) work really hard.

Here's the VBT van and trailer.

Here are the bikes that most of us were using. They are Fuji Sportif LEs. They were pretty new, probably new this season. We have used the same models the past few years and they are perfectly adequate although Stu had a mechanical issue of some kind. They are entry-level, aluminum road bikes with 105 components. They are pretty light (I am guessing about 16 pounds) and they felt pretty responsive. They provide us with a seat bag without tools or a spare tube because, as one of the guides told me, most guests don't want to change flat tires. In fact, they usually will just swap out a wheel on a spare bike since the road bikes are all the same and change the tire in the evening when everything is done for the day.

I brought my SPD pedals. Stu, Walter and Mike brought pedals and also their seats. Stu also brought his own helmet.

We finally got going. As usual, I was the last one out of the parking lot, trying to get all the accessories attached and running.

The route was not flat although the profile said that there were only a couple hundred feet of climbing. Instead, we had rollers and the road would alternate between smooth and rough. There were numerous patches, which reminded us of riding at home.

The word of the day is redundancy. They provide paper maps and cue sheets. They have also started using Ride with GPS last year so we downloaded the routes to our bike computers and smart phones. This year, they provided smartphone mounts on the stem. I couldn't figure out how to attach the route map holder around the smartphone mount plus my computer and lights so I stuck the paper into my jersey pocket.

Stu, Mike and I got rolling and we started to pick off other riders in the group. Walter was ready before us and he did a breakaway. It wasn’t too long before we caught up to him. We proceeded as a group until we arrived at a left turn where our tour guide who was driving the van had parked to make sure we did not miss the turn. I was in front and saw him in time to signal to everyone behind me to make the turn but I overshot the turn and made a slow u-turn. By the time I made the turn, they were gone. While Mike said they waited for me, one rider can rarely close the gap on a group that is moving at tempo. When I got the next turn, I was on my own.

This is when you cannot have enough redundancy. Normally, the paper map and cue sheet would have been fine but didn’t have the map holder on my handlebars because there was no room. Plus, I had forgotten to reset my bike computer from miles to kilometers. So the best I could do is guess where I was on the cue sheet. Ride with GPS might have been helpful but on a garmin 500, the information is limited. I had turned off my cell service so while I had my location, you need to have the cell service turned on to see your location on a map. Once I had everything set up, catching the boyz was out of the question. To add to the adventure, one of the roads on our route was closed for construction. Walter, Stu and Mike were the last ones to make it through before they closed it so the rest of us had to navigate a new route around the detour. Finally, the streets were not laid out in a grid, many were not paved, and a few turned into dead-ends.

Here’s the link to my ride on strava and you can see the fits and starts: https://www.strava.com/activities/1606026161

Here's the link to the ride on Ride with GPS: https://ridewithgps.com/trips/23727997

Despite the fact that it did not turn out to be a no-drop ride, it was enjoyable nonetheless. There was no rain and the destination was in sight. I just had to figure out how to get there.

The destination was Convento do Espinheiro, a convent converted into a hotel. It was spectacular. Before dinner, we went on a tour and visited a working chapel and the wine cellar where we had a wine tasting.

Here's the view out the window of Walter and my room.

We visited the wine cellar before dinner. While the hotel does grow grapes to produce wine, none of it is for sale. Instead, they buy wines from local and distant vineyards and those bottles are for sale.

Here’s one you might enjoy with dinner.

But the winner was this one. It cost 625 euro. Decorative box and corkscrew included.

Here’s a picture of the restaurant.

And here are some other random pictures of the property.

The chapel.

The pulpit in the chapel.

The floor of the chapel.

A hallway.

A stairway to nowhere.

And this was our toilet seat. Can you figure out what the buttons are for?

5/29: day 3 (pre-trip)

Today was the third full day in Lisbon and the last day of our pre-trip.

While VBT made arrangements for picking us up at the airport and setting us up in a hotel in Lisbon, we were on our own for entertainment and meals. For simplicity, we ate at the restaurant in the hotel for breakfast.

The Europeans know how to do breakfast. No powdered eggs or orangeade from a vending machine. The hotel in Lisbon had a magnificent buffet set up in stations.

There was a bread station. (The tongs are there for a reason - today a woman picked up a piece of pound cake with her hands, changed her mind and put it back. Really?!?!?!)

There was an eggs, breakfast meat, potatoes and grilled vegetables station. (The little black pot had sautéed mushrooms and they were delicious.)

There was a cheese and thinly-sliced meats station.

There was a cut fresh fruit station.

There was a fresh-squeezed juice station including a decanter of something green (in the front) they called "de-tox".

And here are the grumpy Americans who couldn't find anything there that they wanted to eat. (Walter must be happy because he has his coffee.)

The breakfast area was in an atrium and had some magnificent art.

In fact, there were pieces of art all over the building.

The configuration of the building does not utilize this grand staircase for regular use.

We did not have plans or tours set up for today. But we started by going to the tourism center and buying a Lisboa day pass (18 euros) that gave us free transportation on the trolleys and entrance into a number of museums and other attractions. 

We took the #15 trolley to a part of the city called Belem where there were a number of attractions that Rick Steves recommended.

The first stop was a monestary (Mosteiro dos Jeronimos).The line stretched out the door and along the sidewalk for maybe 50 meters. It looked like at least an hour waiting in line so we decided to skip it. True to the Rick Steves guidebook, we were able to go directly into the church without waiting in line.

The church was, as many European churches, spectacular. My pictures don't give a good sense of the grandeur of the place.

Mike reminded the agnostic to take off his hat. Thanks, Mike.

At the other end of the building, people were going in so we decided to check it out. It was the entrance to the Museum Nacional de Arquelogia and it was free with our Lisboa pass so we went in. 

It was a small, one-room exhibit of work done at a dig site and it was good for about 15 minutes but it turns out that when we got our tickets for the museum, we could also get immediate entrance tickets to the monestary. We went back to the first entrance and waltzed in like VIPs. 

The monestary itself was large and airy with amazing detail in the columns, walls, and ceilings. 

One room had a wall that was covered with decorative tile.

Another room was a display of Portuguese and world history. It was a one long bulletin board that went around the center of the room with English on the outside and Portuguese on the inside. Surprisingly, most of the visitors stayed on the outside of the display.

A few things stood out. First, I know virtually nothing of Portuguese history except that, like the Spanish, they sailed all over the world. 

Second, their travels involved the slave trade, a dark chapter of human history. 

Third, the Portuguese think in terms of a western-centric view of history. (Columbus didn’t “discover” anything. He may have been the first western European visitor to the New World, but the First Americans didn’t need to be discovered. Happily, Le Moyne College no longer has a core requirement of Western History.)

One of the things the Portuguese brought in their colonization of Brazil was slavery.

Fourth, the Jesuits were mentioned in many phases of Portuguese history. (I should write off this trip as a work expense!)

Here are the three stooges. One is not so bright. (Walter suggested that line.)

The second stop was the Monument to the Discoveries. The monument is a pretty well-known Lisbon tourist attraction. Many of the major figures in Portuguese history are portrayed in these images. It is a modern structure with an elevator and staircase inside. It is hard to get a sense of how tall this structure is from pictures but the people in the foreground may provide a little perspective.

After lunch, we headed down the waterfront to a castle. The line was pretty long and it didn't seem to be moving very fast, so we took pictures of the castle and the line of people along the bridge waiting to get in instead.

"Hello English pig-dogs!"

We kept walking. A nearby grassy area would have been a nice place to hang out if it wasn't cold and windy. We felt particularly bad for the street vendors who were hanging out and hoping for some customers. I took pictures of vendors with a bicycle theme.

This one was pretty cute - she had a boombox going with some Portuguese pop music and she sang while she pedaled. She asked me if I wanted to pedal. I am not sure why she thought that might appeal to me except maybe to warm up?

I felt so bad for this guy selling ice cream, I didn't even try to talk to him.

Finally there were these two guys who were selling beaded bracelets. They were two handsome 20-something kids with man-buns and they were cycling around the world (not circumnavigating the globe, just lots of different places). I don't remember where they had been riding but they were heading north this summer to England and Scotland. then they planned to fly to India and bike in the Himalayas. Then they would ride in Southeast Asia before flying home to Australia. These were their rigs. They claimed that they could pack them up for air travel without paying baggage fees but I don't believe it, especially since they both had trailers.

They gave me a business card for crazyguyonabike.com that purportedly had their travelogue but the website is a mess of postings and it's impossible to find any particular one.

The third stop was the carriage museum. The national carriage museum was one of the destinations that the travel literature said to visit. The exhibit contained dozens of royal carriages in two locations. The first location was a dark gallery with two rooms: one with royal carriages and one with vehicles of that era including fire-fighting equipment and early ambulances.  I found the latter much more interesting,

The second location was across the street in a modern building that looked like it could serve as a convention center. Here's Walter and Mike walking down the hall. That's a lot of carriages!

Just as we were getting tired of looking at one carriage after another, we found a couple carriages with decorations that were over the top. Here's the back of one.

Here's the front of another.

This carriage was too small for people; it was for carrying a religious statue.

There were also sedan chairs. I thought the chinese had invented these since they had so many servants?

After recharging our batteries, we went to dinner and tried another place on the plaza across the street from the hotel, Populi. They advertised having the sexiest WC but it cost a euro to use it so there are no pictures. But wait until you see the pictures of the toilet in the next day's blog entry!

5/28: day 2 (pre-trip)

Today was the second full day of our pre-trip, or more accurately, the first day that we were operating without a serious sleep deficit. The day was dedicated to a took a day trip to Sintra. Mike arranged this with Explore Lisbon and we met the guide (Joao) and a mini-bus after a 10-minute walk from our hotel. I brought the laptop because I was able to keep up with the day's blog while riding in the mini-bus.

The attraction in Sintra is the Park and Palace of Pena that is now a UNESCO heritage site.  We arrived at 10:00am and it was a good thing because we waited about 15 minutes to get in even though the tour had pre-purchased tickets for us (14 euro) and once we got in, we followed a line of tourists along a single route through the interior. As we left, the lines to get in were probably over an hour long. What took us over an hour for the entire tour, it could easily have been a half-day excursion for people arriving when we were leaving.

There’s a free shuttle that takes tourists from the entrance up to the palace. Here is a picture of the shuttle. Joao told us that we could get a true Portuguese experience by taking the shuttle bus: sardines in a can.

We walked up the hill instead and saw some interesting things along the way.

Here's our tour guide Joao playing botanist.

One of the interesting things about the grounds of the palace is that many of the gardens are planted with exotic (non-native) species. Here’s a picture of one of the areas that contained New World plants and what you’re seeing are sequoia.  Another area had species from China.

Neither Walter nor I can remember what this one is. If someone else remembers, add it to the comments!

As we walked up the cobbled roadway, the palace came into view. Because of the fog, it was quite dramatic.

Looks a little like Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

The exterior of the palace was really interesting.  Because the Portuguese were explorers (i.e, oppressors of indigenous cultures),

they brought back ideas from many other countries. (There was a room in the castle that was covered with these tiles.)

The appearance of Moorish culture is evident in many of the exterior structures of this palace.

The multiple colors and multiple architechtural styles reminded me of Segrada Familia by Gaudi in Barcelona.

The weather was misty and windy. It made taking pictures of the scenery from the vantage point of the palace pointless. The view from the castle might have been quite nice but we'll never know. Here's a picture of the fog at the top. The young man behind Walter is Jared, a young man from California who is a graphic designer for a software company.

The interior was actually much less interesting than the exterior although it might have been due to the fact that we could not move at our own pace. Everyone moved at pretty much the same speed which meant it was too slow most of the time.

At one point, Stu jumped the line and he was on the balcony on the other side of the courtyard.

It is clear that Portugal has not quite solved the problem of its own success as a tourist destination.  The day was spent in lines and fighting crowds. The narrow country roads could barely handle two-way traffic and parking was a nightmare. We really appreciated not having to do this ourselves.

Here’s a picture from the village.

Despite creating a turn-out for busses, vehicles often had to double-park to let passengers get on and off.

Our next stop was at Cabo da Roca, the western-most spot in continental Europe. Here is the monument marking the spot.

But the scenery was the main attraction. It’s hard to get a sense of the magnitude of the drop-off from where we were standing at the top of the cliffs to the ocean below but here’s a try.

I wish I had the telephoto lens for these shots.

The dangerous areas were roped off and clearly marked. Still, some people insist on tempting fate.

Our final stop was in Cascais, a seaside village that is considered a suburb of Lisbon, about 45 minutes away. It is a modern town and there is some money here so this combination of factors makes much less charming. We walked through the area where the shops are located and it started raining so we found a restaurant where we sat it out over drinks. Our tour guide pointed out that the weather was not usually like this. That became the joke of the day.

On the way, we saw some municipal workers re-setting some of the stones that make up the sidewalks. It is manual labor in every sense of the word. Here are a couple of pictures of them, smoothing out the surface, chipping the stones to create the correct shape, setting them into the subsurface and tapping them into place. It didn’t look like they used any materials to keep the stones in place other than good fit and gravity.

Here is what the final product looks like.