Chapter seven of seven. Hoo boy! Writing the blog about our trip may have taken me longer than the trip itself!
Indeed, the delightful weeklong drive around northern Portugal provided a plethora of picturesque photos (I just had to pay homage to the “P” right there, especially since, um, our journeys were often defined by the “P” if you know what I mean… and you’ll automatically know what I mean if you’re middle-aged or later), but we certainly didn’t see all there is to see. I found that out because every time we talk to a Português and they ask where we went, they follow up with a question as to whether we saw this place or that, and our answer always seems to be, “Oh, we must’ve missed that!”
Apparently the things to see in Portugal are never-ending. We know we’re going to have to go back up north again when we get tired of not being bored in retirement.
Regardless, we enjoyed every minute of our journey. We also saved one of the best visits for the last entry:
Tomar
The town of Tomar has a population of about 20,000, and was an important city throughout Portuguese history. The main attraction is the Convent of Christ: a former Roman Catholic complex which also was a stronghold run by the Knights Templar. The castle of Tomar was built around 1160; the Keep in Tomar is one of the oldest in the country.
The towers of the castle were a something of an advancement in that they were built in a round shape, which provides better defense than square towers, unless of course the attack is nuclear.
Originally, most of its residents lived in dwellings located inside the outer walls of the castle for protection. The entire complex is quite expansive; they probably could have hidden almost everyone in the town inside the buildings.
In fact, legend has it that the song made famous in the movie Annie was first written here to make the people who couldn’t be squeezed in feel hopeful that there might be room the next day: “The sun will come out, Tomar-oh, bet your bottom escudo that in Tomar-oh, it’ll be fun! Tomar-oh, Tomar-oh! I love ya Tomar-oh! You’re only a day away!”
I so wanted to show all of our individual pictures and make corny jokes or pithy comments on all of them, but there’s too damn many photos for that. I think Tomar set a personal record for us in terms of photos taken; we were there for quite a while. Of course, I had to share a few separately because they’re just too ripe for the pickin’. For instance in the above I’m sitting right next to a kitchen and I’m pretty sure those holes had something to do with cooking, but it sure doesn’t look like it. It reminded us of the public toilets in the Roman Colosseum and a story of sponges we have since tried very hard to forget. Still, based on looks alone, the phrase, “this food tastes like shit!” can’t help but come to mind.
This is just to give you a sample of the many glorious pictures you’ll see if you have the time to watch the slide show. We were quite impressed with the entire shebang.
And so without further ado, I present the slide show of photos. Wait, where is everyone?
And that’s it for our trip up north! We’ll surely be up there again sometime, because there are a lot more sights to see. Portugal is truly a historical and natural wonder.
You can scroll down if you missed any of the previous six chapters.
Tchau for now!
Here are some panoramic shots from atop the mountain. The temperature was almost exactly 32 degrees, or in the much more sensible measurement of celsius: zero. It was easily the coldest we’ve been since we’ve been to Portugal, except for that time I got locked in a walk-in freezer after thinking it was the men’s room.
We drove up one side of the mountain and down another, and both were slightly harrowing, made all the more so after we noticed many of the guard rails were made of stone. I’m not sure I’d trust the stone not to break in a thousand little pieces if rammed with any amount of force, meaning we’d break into yet another thousand pieces when we hit the ground two million meters below.
But as you can see, we made it safe, sound, and chilly.
road led by this massive wall, the other side of which was crawling with crazed zombie Mexicans just like in World War Z. Oh wait, those weren’t Mexicans, those were Spaniards! Good thing Portugal already built a huge wall! Actually, it is the non-water side of a dam. At least we hoped it would stay non-watery.
At the top, they have about five different stores, each offering various cold weather gear, cheeses and meats. Because nothing says “keeping warm” like cheese and meat.
The funny thing was, each of them offered almost exactly the same thing, even though some of them were side-by-side and even shared the same entrance.
They each had display cases filled with aromatic cheese and meats, always with a friendly offer of some samples, and each of them had snow gear and souvenirs, apparently all purchased from the same very talented distributor salesperson.
It was like being in a strip mall with five 7-11’s in a row.
On the plus side, you could try on a hat exactly like this in five different stores!
During our explorations, we took a small detour on a road with no idea as to where it led. It ended up being a pretty hairy drive, with drops off the side that would’ve turned our VW Polo, Marco, into a pancake… covered with raspberry syrup from our bodies, if you know what I mean. But we survived, with the added bonus of confirming that the sweat glands in our hands work just fine, thank you.
As you surely must know by now because of all the Portuguese lessons you’re taking in preparation for your visit to us in Portugal, “Manteiga” means “butter.”
Accordingly, I assume those are terraces are where they grow buttercups. Because buttercups are what they make butter out of, right? Carolyn says “no way.” I say “whey.” She says, “I curd of told you that.” I say, “Tit for tat!”
You don’t want to have butterfingers when you’re driving on the roads leading to the town. You’d turn into butter squash pretty quickly.
I think this is a butter stream where they churn all the butter, kind of like Willy Wonka did with his chocolate rivers. Or maybe they were churning margarine, it was hard to tell because at that point in its production butter is clear, as we all know.
Despite the fact that butter can be a little fattening, it was a charming village. We had some pizza there, because everyone knows when you go into a Portuguese town named “Butters” you have to have pizza. The crust was, of course, buttery. We were going to have pepperoni, but we decided on da udder one.
A picturesque view of a butter farm. You can tell by all the buttercups and milkweed.
Ha ha! It’s not really part thirteen, it just feels like it.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite as cool as the pictures make it look. But I guess you could say that about most models and movie stars too.
But, intrepid explorer that I am, when I saw this bilingual sign (which means I could completely understand it despite the lack of French), I had to have some fun with it.
This is the un-Photoshopped version that caused my gruesome injuries, as well as the destruction of my favorite pants.
So the first thing you gotta do before you go to the castle is pass inspection by these fearsome army men. Actually, they’re the aforementioned soldiers who are still attacking visitors. Okay, best one out of three: there’s an army base not far from the castle and they were there to escort some dignitaries (besides Carolyn) to the castle for sightseeing. They were kind enough to pose for a picture in exchange for not shooting me.
You have to walk the plank to a large cruise ship which takes you to the castle for a few euros.
This is the bow of the ship. There wasn’t enough room to do the “Titanic” scene, unfortunately. Our hearts will still go on.
This is the cheerful and garrulous Captain of the ship. Just kidding. He was none of those things. But he was quite adept at steering a small boat for a couple hundred meters.
Once you land, they like to see if you’ll take these steps to nowhere, and if you do, everyone laughs hysterically.
If you take the correct path, you get to walk under a bridge of cactus. My speculation is they might have once served as a eco-friendly defensive tactic way back when, which means those cacti probably weren’t there in 1129 when it was conquered by Portuguese forces. Indeed, none of the historical writings mention any kind of massive sticker shock.
Once in the castle, you can look down and see where the boat docks, as well as our trusty Marco the Polo. Not sure if you can tell which one it is in that sea of cars, but it’s the dark one.
But here’s what I found interesting. They take you in a boat to the castle, but this is the size of the river channel you would otherwise need to cross to get there.
And here’s how wide it is right next to the castle.
In fact, here’s a little crossing you could take without even getting wet! All they have to do is build a walkable path beyond and voila! No more boat needed! I’m guessing they keep the boat because it’s sort of a nice story that you have to take a boat to the castle.
But that means when you’re all done with your visit you have to wait at the dock for the boat to return. He gave us about twenty minutes to look through the castle. We got back to the dock in nineteen. Despite that, he was already on his way back to the original dock when we got there, so we had to wait some more. Oh, well, we’re retired. We can wait. I decided not to even give him a dirty look when we returned because I didn’t want to be dragged out to the middle of the river and keelhauled.
This is one of the main drags. Not the guy in the picture, he never poses in drag. Publicly anyway.
The castle was mostly grass and walls. In the old days, that area would have been filled with wooden structures and smelly people. Now there’s only one. Wooden structure, I mean.
One of the reasons we love castles is because they’re almost always built on top of hills, where we can gaze over the landscape and be on the lookout for invading Mexicans. Oh, wait, that’s only in the U.S.
You’re always on your own when it comes to safety. You have to pay extra for guard rails, except you can’t pay anyone, and there are no portable guard rails. Just be sure to wear New Balance shoes.
Most days we figured out where we were going to go the same morning, sometimes only after fighting over the phone and its map as we drove away from the hotel property while dodging pedestrians and going through roundabouts the wrong way.
I mean, who wouldn’t want to come home to that?
Or this?
But, in the meantime, you can still see vistas like this until the internet is replaced by something else.
The prehistoric art in Côa Valley was discovered when they were building a dam. The whole project stopped so they could investigate the priceless art.
Which also means we still get to gaze at the beauty of the valley.
These are artifacts from 24,000 and 30,000 years ago. BP means “Before Present, ” and is a time scale used in archaeology. Since of course the “present” time changes (unless you’re dead, in which case you really don’t care much about any of this), the present in “BP” is generally assumed to be January 1st, 1950. That’s also the month that U.S. President Harry S. Truman ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb, which may or may not be a coincidence. It may also mean that in the future, “BP” will mean “Before Pulverization.”
In any case, this is what little Johnny Caveman doodled while his teacher was droning on about how to kill antelopes or drag girls by their hair some such. Little did he know he’d be famous 20,000 years later.
Johnny Caveman’s sister apparently tried to one-up him by drawing a picture of their pet ox. I think she has it farting.
There was a large and modern museum where we learned all sorts of stuff about what these drawings probably meant, and how they cleverly depicted movement and things like that. Since we arrived late because, as usual, we had no plan or idea as to what we were doing, we didn’t get to take a tour down into the valley to see the actual drawings. So after we left I stopped off the side of the road and etched my own drawings into some rocks, giggling all the while at how confused archeologists will be 1,000 years from now since of course we will never otherwise find ancient cave art of a dinosaur.
Coimbra is a university town in the middle of Portugal that deserves its own entry in this blog, even though we only spent part of one day there.
This is a panoramic shot of the main square in the university. The buildings here offer three very interesting tours of some cool historical stuff, as you’ll see below.
This is the front entrance (used as an exit) of an amazingly decorated old library, which you’ll see the inside of below. Note the smartly dressed cape-and-tie students.
This is a church on the University grounds. You walk past it to get to the science museum, the inside of which you’ll see below.
This is a statue of King Jo
We’re not from New Jersey and we speak a little Portuguese, so we don’t call him King Johnny da Turd. We call him King Jo
We’ll call this the Door of the Day since I can’t remember where it was exactly. Looks a little holy-ish though.
You walk through this to get into the historical inner square of the University. I’m guessing the clothing at the top is the result of college dares, hazing, or perhaps it’s actually the underwear of the workers who were installing the grate but kept falling off, except for their underwear which tended to get snagged on the grate. Then no one wanted to move any of it because, you know, it’s men’s underwear, which should never be touched by anyone but the owner, their wives, or their mothers, and even then only with a lot of mental griping as to why men are so stinky.
That’s where the door is from the previous photo in case you were thinking I made all that up.
You can walk down these stairs to go into the library, unless you have no legs, then you have to roll.
This is the central square. It was all once a royal palace. In fact, the first one in Portugal.
This is the Via Latina, erected in the 18th century. My high school Spanish would translate that as “The Road of a Latin Woman” (even though “via” is more of an Italian word), but I’m guessing that’s not what it really means, especially since we’re not in Spain or Italy… or Kansas.
This is simply called “The Tower.” And of course they would have built a phallic building right next to a Via Latina. Anyway, it was built in the early 1700s, and has bells that still chime plus a staircase all the way to the top. We didn’t bother going up because we’ve walked up plenty of ancient spiral staircases over the last few years, and we’re two years older than we were two years ago, as you probably are as well.
This is a picture of a red car. An old building just happens to be behind it. In all seriousness, red cars are a little bit of an exception in Portugal. It’s something I noticed when we first got here: almost all the cars are either grey, silver, white, or black. Dunno why.
A view from the square, overlooking the Mondego River, which is the longest river located exclusively in Portuguese territory. It begins its journey from the Serra da Estrela mountains, which we visited and you can read about later.
Unlike a lot of university buildings I’ve seen, this one does a very good job of being labeled. It means Faculty of Medicine, in case your mental faculties are waning.
The first part of the three-part tour was into the Biblioteca Joanina. They didn’t allow photography in the library itself, so I had to steal a couple of pictures off the internet. I wanted to do that because it truly is an amazing place. We just stood and gawked in awe at the number of old books and the grandeur of the rooms.
It was built in the 18th century, and is now a priceless National Monument.
The floor below the Biblioteca Joanina is a depository of many other old books, some of which are gigantic in size.
“Ssssh!”
Inside the complex is a small chapel, as usual, ornately decorated.
This is a courtyard near The Tower. I’m guessing it’s called The Courtyard.
We wanted this table for our dining room, but apparently it’s not for sale. Bummer. When I tried to explain to them that “priceless” means there’s no price and so therefore it’s free, they just looked at me funny, as the Portuguese often do.
It isn’t every day we find a door customized to fit my large American bulk.
They apparently hadn’t learned about blueprints yet.
Once again, Carolyn found herself trapped inside a display case in a museum.
This is a whale of a picture. I wrote that on porpoise.
Whales are so ginormous, it’s almost hard to fathom. Get it? Fathom? Ha ha! No? Anyway, I found it interesting that recently scientists 
Fierce pussies aren’t afraid to use their teeth and claws.
Even in death, these animals can’t get away from their herd mentality. Oh deer!
This room contained all sorts of old scientific instruments. Don’t know how they sounded in an orchestra, though.
If that isn’t one of the weirdest skeletons ever, I don’t know what is.
Lots of old taxidermy, although today they call it Uberdermy.
These skulls demonstrate why I avoid being bitten by animals with big teeth.
The museum used to be a place of learning with seats designed to keep you wide awake because they were so uncomfortable.
When you’re dead, he’ll pick your bones.
Guess he picked these clean too. But seriously, those are freaky long arms. As humans evolved from the apes, I think the friction from the ground is what shortened our arms. However, they definitely had an easier time clipping their toenails, so I’m not sure this whole evolution thing is all that smart.
Not all genetic accidents lead to adaptations in species, otherwise we’d have two-headed animals all over the place. On the other hand, if a human developed that way and one head was a right-winger and the other a left-winger, it sure would be entertaining to watch them argue! Or what if one was religious and the other an atheist? The religious one would go nuts worrying that his other head would land them both in hell! That might be quite an issue for conjoined twins!
P
eregrine Falcons are near and dear to me because I developed a limited edition scrimshaw knife set back in the early ’80s which highlighted their status as an endangered species. Their decline was largely due to the extensive use of DDT, something my very conservative boss at the time scoffed at; he thought DDT was awesome. Fortunately, they didn’t listen to knuckle-headed anti-environmental conservatives like him back then, and so the cessation of the use of DDT allowed this magnificent animal to recover enough to be taken off the endangered species list in 1999. Maybe my little collector’s item helped with that!
Here’s another table we wanted to buy as well. But again, not for sale. Haven’t the Portuguese heard about free enterprise? Sheesh!
baldsasquatchdotcom 