Blogs from Portugal, Europe - page 260

Ahoy mates, just arrived in Lisbon last night. I guess the only thing I can say is INCREDIBLE! Sailing the high seas was nuts. 240 nautical miles from land in the Bay of Biscay behind the helm in a gail force 7 wind with waves crashing over the sides at 12:00 at night. Completely insane. After 5 days at sea, there is nothing like sailing along the Spanish and Portugese coast visiting ports. Vigo, Spain was beautiful, (especially the beach the captain anchored us off of - NUDE!); Porto, Portugal was filled with port tasting at the 30+ port houses. I just finished taking a walk around the waterfront in Lisbon. The weather has been exceptional and it is about 28 degrees right now. i have a bunch of pictures to e-mail, but I can't from ... read more

What do you do when you have a weekend off on Costa del Sol and want to get away from it all...? Easy - you go to Portugal. A most spontaneous trip it is. Initiator Miguel - in close co-operation with me and my car - do actually not have to excert a lot of influence to convince the two Swedish guapas Ida and Ullis to come along. Off we go. Via Seville, where a friendly police officer escorts us out of town and points us in the right direction, the road to Algarve is wide open. Of course with the obligatory pit stops to fill up water in the overheated radiator... After not too much hassle we enter Portugal, a first-timer for most of us. The first city we reach is Olhao. It doesn't take ... read more

Upon arrival, first priority was again to find somewhere to stay. It didn’t take long to discover that our books that were supposed to be up-to-date weren’t. The first hostel didn’t exist, the second had hiked up their prices to out of our range and the third, the YHA for which there were accurate directions, was full. As they had done in Paris, they found us somewhere else. This looked like it could have been a brothel, but we were grateful for anywhere. We set off to try and find a beach, just to discover that the nearest one of any quality was a half-hour train ride away. We went back to the hostel to get our Inter-rail tickets, just to discover that it was locked. Depressed, we spent the rest of the day checking out ... read more

Our next NATO Infrastructure Committee visit was to Portugal. Mom and Dad volunteered to babysit Tamara, so that Linda could go. Linda was now three months pregnant with our second child. So this would be her third trip while pregnant; the others being Norway and Germany in 1985. My parents arrived in Brussels on 2 April, so they had a few days before we left to settle in. 6 April 1987 Monday. The committee members and spouses met at Zaventum Airport in Brussels where we caught a commercial flight on TAP to Lisbon. The committee then proceded to the Ministry of Defense for lunch, briefings, and an overview of what we would see in the coming week. Following this meeting we checked into our hotel where we had the rest of the evening free. Several of ... read more