Portugal Day 3

So this proved to be one of the more 'exciting' days on the trip, depending on your definition of exciting....

We had to wake up fairly early because we decided to go hang out in Lisbon all day instead of Porto since the weather in Porto wasn't all that great. This meant catching a 9:30am train so we could get to Lisbon at a reasonable hour and have a good portion of the day to wander about before boarding the hotel train at 10:30pm. So we were up and at em, packing all our stuff up (I wasn't going to be back in Porto again before heading home) and heading to the train station. We took a taxi because, although it was "all downhill" as Jerry promised, I really didn't care and wasn't interested in lugging my bags downhill to the station. Good thing cause the taxi ride took about 10 minutes (which means it would've probably taken me an hour to waddle). We get to the station with about 20 minutes till the train leaves and Jerry gets this panicked look on his face. All the money that he's been so diligently saving up for our trip from his per diem that he hasn't spent....left back in the hotel safe (and it was a pretty darn good amount). He immediately takes off, ON FOOT, back to the hotel. I'll never know how he did it, but he managed to get back to the hotel, get the money, and get back to the train station inside of 15 minutes.

We hop on the train and get settled for a two hour or so ride. We're in "first class" which just means you get a little snack on the train. It was so funny though - they give us a menu that has choices on it, but then just brought us something else entirely that wasn't on the menu at all. Not that we really cared, but it was like "here's what you COULD have, but we don't really feel like serving that, so you'll be getting this instead."

The train ride was somewhat uneventful until I noticed Jerry's got this weird look on his face. I ask him what's wrong, and he tells me he doesn't feel so well. Seriously? This guy NEVER gets sick, and when he does it's like the world's coming to an end. I won't go into all the gory details of what was wrong with him, but let's just say once we were in Lisbon we got to see a Portuguese ER in action. I must say that from start to finish we were only there for about an hour and a half. It was impressive. And always fun to try to navigate the medical community in an entirely different language from your own. Stuff like this would usually send me into a tailspin, but I just sort of went with the flow and we were making jokes about it the entire time. Thank goodness we had switched Jerry from my medical insurance to his company's for while he's overseas. I don't know this for a fact, but I'm pretty sure it helped minimize the pain of the entire process.

After that little side adventure we decided to go get something to eat since we managed to miss lunch altogether. By this time it was around 4 or so, so we were running out of daylight in Lisbon. We had grand plans of all of the fun things we were going to go see, but only managed to hit the Santa Justa elevator and do some general wandering around in the city before heading back over to the train station.

We could board the overnight train from Lisbon to Madrid at 10pm, so we were at the station around 9:30 anxiously awaiting when we could board. Jerry was just so excited about the concept of an overnight train....I myself was not sold on the idea, but went along with it because I knew Jerry thought it sounded like fun. We got on the train and were directed to our cabin. Honestly it should be called a very tiny hole in the wall, because that's what it was. It was pretty much exactly as I had anticipated; I think Jerry was a little surprised. When the beds were let down out of the wall, you could barely get around (especially if you happened to be 28 weeks pregnant). The bathroom was a joke, but at least we didn't have to stumble down the corridor to go pee in the middle of the night. I could tell Jerry was truly disappointed because it hadn't lived up to his expectations, but we just repeated our motto of "it's an adventure" and sucked it up. They served dinner at 10:30 (normal for Portugal, although by this time I'm beyond starving) so we headed to the dining car, ate dinner, then went back and attempted to get comfy in the little cracker jack box of a room we had. I have no clue how these other people that didn't get the sleeper cars did it. This was definitely one of those experiences that I'm glad we did and can say we've done it....but I do NOT care to repeat it in this lifetime, unless it's the freaking Orient Express or something.