Day 1: Travel to Lisbon and Some Exploring

I recently had the opportunity to explore Portugal on a Viking River Cruise. Here is day one of the adventure!

Flying to Lisbon from the East Coast is an adventure in itself. I left Nashville at 2:35 pm and had a layover in Newark, where I met up with my friend Lee. We boarded our plane to Lisbon at about 7:00 pm and then after a short delay for a flight attendant medical emergency, we were on our way. Then, about half way through the flight (I’m guessing about timing because I was mostly asleep at this point) there was some shouting and people running to the front of the plane. What?

It was a passenger medical emergency, and we were somewhere over the Atlantic, so the only option was to ask if there was a doctor on board. Fortunately the passenger appeared to be okay, at least far as we could tell. As we disembarked the plane, she was seated in her wheelchair and there were paramedics checking her vitals. Hopefully she was okay and able to enjoy her time in Portugal.

The challenge with a trip like this is, of course, jet lag. When we arrived in Lisbon it was about 10:00 am the next morning, which meant our day was just starting after a long day and night of travel. And we couldn’t get into our rooms until 3:00 pm. We left our luggage at Hotel Tivoli Avenida Liberdade, where we would be staying for the first two nights, and then dragged our tired, selves out the door for a (very long) trek to TimeOut Market.

TimeOut Market is a huge food court that had soooo many options for our first meal in Portugal! There is an upper entertainment level, but we didn’t make it up there. I had a hard time deciding what to order because I was too tired and dehydrated to be hungry. But I ordered some shrimp with garlic, which was one of the recommendations Lee had read about and I figured it was safe for me. It was a dish of shrimp that was swimming in a delicious butter and garlic base and served with bread – to sop up the sauce. I didn’t get a pic of it, but there’s pic on the TimeOut Market website here. I would have loved it any other time, but I’m afraid it was lost on me this day. I also bought two bottles of water, which was really what I needed.

Some of the sites from our first day: