Portugal: How Did We Get So Lucky?

Every married couple needs to take time out for themselves—whether it’s regular dates on a Friday night, surprise lunch during the week or a trip away from it all. Having been married for over thirteen years, we know that making time for dates is important, fun and relatively easy, especially now that Katya can watch the boys up to two hours at a time. Taking a longer trip without children has always posed a greater challenge since we have always lived so far away from family who could take care of the kids for us. Luckily, over the years, we have made wonderful friends in all places where we’d lived. While we lived in Minnesota, our friends watched Katya and Alex when we went to my cousin’s wedding in Paris. In Japan—we left the kids for a week to go to Australia to celebrate our ten year anniversary. And here—we managed to convince our kind friends to watch all of our kids for the whole three day weekend!
And it all started with a random travel article posted on one of the Travelling Facebook groups: Europe's best affordable castle hotels. In summary, the article listed a few places in Europe that were considered to be cool castles/chateaux/forts where we could spend a night. I looked through a few of them trying to figure out their location and see if it’s where we’d want to go travel next. One of the places sounded very familiar-Sintra-and I quickly recalled my friend, who lives in Spain right now, telling me about a beautiful place in Portugal that she and her husband recently visited.
So I looked up more information about Sintra and about this hotel-fort on the Portuguese coast, figured out that it was only a 30 min drive from Lisbon, checked ticket prices (that turned out to be only $86 roundtrip per person) for Martin Luther King Day weekend…and booked the trip for just me and Robert. I was willing to splurge on the hotel a bit since I was looking for a unique experience and since we had no children with us this time (we don’t normally stay at hotels when we travel with them). But it just happened so that the hotel is having a promotion during the low season of Stay 3 nights Pay for 2. Score! And it included breakfast. Easy!
My mom was originally hoping to be here to help us with childcare, but, unfortunately, our plans didn’t turn out as they were supposed to. Thankfully, our friends were kind enough to help us go on this wonderful adventure!
And so it began with a quick 2 hour flight, getting a rental car (30 euros for 3 days!) and driving from Lisbon airport to the coast. Robert is a pro by now at driving rental stick shift cars, but I still get nervous, especially as he is getting used to a new rental car, narrow streets and uphill parking. Our GPS comes with us when we go places and usually it leads us to the right spot. This time, as we opted for the fastest route (as usual) and said “yes” to the unpaved roads (with hesitation), we put our trust into the GPS, at least reminding ourselves that we were two seasoned travellers (with no hungry kids in the back), at 10 pm in a foreign country, so we’d figure it out.

All was well while we were staying on the big motorway, but once we took the exit towards Cascais, thing got a bit shady. Our GPS took us through some REALLY narrow streets with a few dead ends and no markings. We knew the hotel was towards the coast, so after making our GPS angry a few times, we just sort of ignored what it was saying and started making our way to where we thought the ocean was. We knew that we could always stop and ask for directions..but you know…it’s 10 pm and it’s Portugal. We took a random road that looked like was a private road with fancy houses on a hill, then a few more narrow roads and suddenly we joined in with a very nice two lane road! By that time, the GPS caught up with us and we calmed down a bit.

But when the GPS said , “You have reached your destination…” , and there was NOTHING nearby except the ocean…I got a bit nervous. I only saw hotel’s location on Google Maps and that helped us to decide to just drive a bit further down the coast and hopefully find our Fort-hotel. We felt a great sense of relief to see a big building that looked like a fort in the dark with a “hotel” sign pointing towards it. Behind the building, it was pitch black—that was the ocean! We found it!

Well, the hotel, Fortaleza do Guincho hotel, turned out to be a complete surprise! It didn’t look fancy from the outside, just looked like an old fortress, and rightly so, as it was a fort built in the 17th century. The following pictures were taken on the following day, since it was light outside.

Inside, we were welcomed by a quite interior hall with very pleasant concierge. It was very quiet and pleasant in the lobby-travelling during the low season has its perks.

We got upgraded to a nicer room with a balcony and a view to the ocean. Walking up to our room, I was noticing all the beautiful decorations, carpeting and furniture.

Our room was just perfect as well-cute chocolates on the bed, fresh fruit and free drinks.

One of the best parts was our own balcony with a lounger and soundproof windows. When I first came out to the balcony to see the view, it was pitch dark and super quiet. As soon as I opened the window, I heard the waves crushing against the rocks and the wind howling all around. It was AMAZING!

The next morning we woke up to a beautiful sunny weather and a calm ocean. That’s a view of our hotel from the Guincho beach.

Oh, it was amazing to be this close to the water.

I could have stayed at that balcony all day, listening to the waves and the wind roaring, but we had to run downstairs to get our free breakfast before 10:30 am.

To finish my first post about our trip, I have to tell you about that breakfast at our hotel.

Oh. My. Goodness.

Europeans know how to do breakfast foods right. Nah, we don’t need a full English breakfast with sausages and fried potato patties. Juicy exotic fruits, granola, all sorts of cheese, cured meats, salmon, freshly baked to perfection bread, croissants, omelets with veggies—now THAT is a breakfast with lots of choices. Every morning of our stay here I filled up two plates---one with savory things such as salmon and bread and another one with sweeter things. Hot chocolate was included! We weren’t hungry till late afternoon most days!

Okay, I am hungry now.

But will take a break till the next post.

Tchau!

Lyana.