As mentioned in yesterday's post Jess and I ran into the problem of the castle we seek being super far from our current location. Because it's so far there doesn't seem to be anything listed regarding bus, train, or metro transportation. So, instead of going to the castle it was another day at home here in Portugal. Still, it wasn't a fruitless occasion either! We rolled out of bed around 12:00pm because that's apparently who we are now and Jess secluded herself in the living room to get some research done on how to get us to this castle. I had 4 pieces of toast because I'm a human disaster and eventually Jess joined me in the kitchen for 2 of her own. She had discovered the correct number to use to phone the castle. The castle is currently being used as a hotel, which certainly explains why it wasn't showing up in lists of castles in Portugal. Like a lot of European countries, Portugal has a large number of castle and most of them have been preserved as tourists attractions. As a hotel, however, the Paco de Gloria has escaped notice for almost a century as the castle of Elizabeth Stetson and her husband because it wouldn't be included in lists of castles to visit in Portugal. It's not even really advertised as a castle, just as an antique and historic building with classic rooms for rent. Not super useful for anyone going castle-hunting, amiright?
Jess had some issues figuring out how to make the call because we're in Portugal and everything is different, but she persevered and managed to get through. While she busied herself with the call I did the laundry which meant a lot of casual eavesdropping to see what was going on. She explained to the person who answered who she was and what she was looking for and she was transferred to a man named Lemo. Lemo was especially nice and extraordinarily useful. He confirmed for her that Alexio, Count we Santa Eulalia was he owner of the castle, saying he actually sits across from a painting of him! He also confirmed that he owned and was buried at the monastery, Refoios do Lema. Lemo tried to put Jess in touch with an R. Shilling who owns the castle/hotel as he would have more information. Unfortunately, he's in California at the moment and wasn't able to take calls, but Leno passed on his email address to Jess so she could reach out herself. There was not end to his usefulness, though, as Jess asked about transportation to the castle from Lisbon. He happily informed her that the Red Expressos station at the Sete Rios train stop has a bus that will take us basically a 10 minute walk away from the castle. The ride, however, is 5 hours long, giving us a grand total of 2 hours at the castle for a one-day trip and is looking to be about 34 dollars per person each way. Ouch. But, we came to see a castle, and see a castle we shall!
Like I said, not much really went down. While we received awesome and necessary information for Jessica's research, we physically did very little. Post phone call we discovered we were running out of toilet paper and cheese and made a run to the store where we also got more Napolitanas and a Mars bar for Jess to celebrate a job well done so far! We had dinner of grilled cheese and peas and pastries while we watched Murder, She Wrote. One of the episodes was with Lucy Lawless and it was great! We made a plan to get to the Sete Rios stop the following day to buy the tickets for the day after so we won't have to putz around in line the day of and potentially miss our bus. Now, you can buy the tickets online, but we already have the money we transferred into euros and it'd be a waste to just buy the tickets online when we have the money in cash to afford them. I'd rather pay 4 euro for a train ride to buy them in cash than spend 100 something euro extra a let the money we brought go to waste. It makes sense to us. That being agreed upon we relaxed once again before we were off to bed. Not much to report for this post, but we did get a lot of valuable information and brats exactly what we came here to get!
No comments:
Post a Comment