Our original Sunday agenda included a day trip to Sintra, home of some of Portugal’s most famous sites including the Moorish Castle, Pena Palace, and Quinta da Regaleira. However, our itinerary was up in the air following our scare with Eilidh last night that ended up in an emergency room visit and new prescription medicine.
Eilidh was better Sunday than Saturday, but cranky and clingy, so Amanda decided the most prudent decision was to keep her home. I wanted to take the older kids to a place called The Fantastic World of Portuguese Sardines, so we made a short trip on the Metro there, and combined our visit with yet another lunch at McDonald’s.
Custom sardine cans featuring every birth year since 1916 were available for purchase at the sardine shop! We focused in on the 2010s, when Noah, Emmie, and Eilidh were born.
Before we left for Sintra, I needed to find lunch for Amanda and Cassy. This proved to be a challenge, as the kebab place I had in mind was closed on Sundays, as were several other neighborhood restaurants within walking distance of our apartment. I eventually found a restaurant called Karma, one of the handful of places highlighted by Elsa during her neighborhood orientation on our first night in the Lisbon apartment.
The restaurant manager ensured me a takeaway order was no problem and pointed to his steak and chicken as menu highlights. I ordered one of each, then waited… and waited… and waited. More than 30 minutes had elapsed before the meal was ready, and when it was, the cooks had to scramble to find enough containers for the food. I had a hodge-podge of disposable and reusable plastic containers to house the food.
While the meal received okay marks from Amanda and Cassy, it probably wasn’t worth the time or effort involved to procure. We were now looking at a mid-afternoon departure time to Sintra.
Cassy, Noah, Emmie, and I made the short Metro trip to the Rossio train station, where we arrived in plenty of time for the 40-minute ride to Sintra. We perused the train station’s gift shop and grabbed a couple of small waters before securing our seats on the train.
When we disembarked from the train, we immediately noticed a change in temperature: it was at least 10 degrees cooler in Sintra compared to Lisbon and we wondered for a moment whether we should have dressed warmer. (We were fine.)
We purchased the round-trip fare on the 434 bus which took travelers in a loop through the main tourist stops around Sintra. We were told the Moorish Castle was the second stop on the loop, but we actually should have stayed on until the third stop. Our early exit added another 500 meters of walking to our trek!
Starting the walk to the Moorish Castle ticket booth.
Accessing the castle seemed to require continuous uphill walking, and by the end of the day, my phone had logged the equivalent of over 100 flights of stairs climbed. We hiked upward to get the ticket booth, upward to get to the castle entrance, and again up steps to get to the castle peaks for the best views, and best photos.
Despite the wind, Emmie’s excited to pose in front of the Pena Palace…
…before disappointment set in when I told her we didn’t have time to visit the palace.
Our late arrival to Sintra, combined with some tiredness from the castle hike, meant we only made it to one of the city’s primary attractions. We did, of course, have room for food, grabbing pastries at Rick Steves’ recommended Casa Piriquita.
I grabbed a ticket, waited, and then purchased a dozen “queijadas,” a pastry with a thin crust and apple-pie-resembling filling that is actually made with cheese, sugar, eggs, flour, and a touch of cinnamon. The intention was to eat six and take six back to Amanda. However, Cassy, Noah, Emmie, and I liked them so much, we ate them all, and I took another number to buy more.
While waiting to buy another six to take home, I saw several customers precede me in line bought a larger pastry which looked tasty. It turns out these were travesseiros, a pillowy pastry filled with egg cream and almond, considered one of the restaurant’s other “house specials.” I bought three of these, and they were equally popular with our Sintra-traveling crew.
After dropping Cassy and the older kids off at the apartment, I returned to the Metro to make a pizza run. We’d eaten a decent amount of traditional Portuguese food while in Lisbon, and my one attempt at pizza (at the downtown mall) was a bust. So, I found the nearest Telepizza, a Spain-based pizza chain with a strong Portugal (and Lisbon) presence.
While they specialize in delivery, and we’d seen their red-painted delivery bikes several times while exploring the city, I wasn’t confident in my ability to place a delivery order by phone or online. Fortunately, the in-store ordering process went smoothly, and I had three small pizzas ready to take home within 15 minutes.
Even though Noah would have preferred a plain cheese pizza, he enjoyed the ham-topped pie. The bacon-and-BBQ pizza was the favorite for Amanda, Cassy, and me. An unusual volcano pizza rounded out our order, where a pizza was cooked around a vat of nacho cheese and topped with corn chips. Of course, the pizza was served with an ice-cold Coca-Cola 2-liter from the neighborhood market between the Metro and our apartment.
