Day 10 - Lisbon

On day 10 we docked at Lisbon, which is the capital of Portugal. When we got off the ship, we found a taxi that could take seven people. The reason that Portuguese is a lot different than Spanish is because the Portugal was settled by people from Tyre. The first stop was a palace, which was the King and Queen's vacation home when it was built. After we went through that, we stopped at another palace, which was the main palace at one time. After we had gone through that I was tired of palaces, and we went to a Moorish Castle. We had to wait for our taxi driver, because he was having lunch. All of the other taxi drivers said that he was a bad taxi driver.

The Moorish Castle was built on a steep hill, so even though the taxi took us most of the way there was still a hike up, so our Grandparents stayed behind (they had also seen it before.) The Castle was very strong, and since it was on a hill could not easily be surprised by any large number of men. This was one of the first castles that the Portuguese drove the Moors out of. It's walls were not very high from the inside but since it was on a cliff, the walls were high from the outside. After we went through the castle we asked the driver to take us to a place where we could go shopping. He did, and we looked around there for about ten or twenty minutes. After that we came back to the cruise ship. In the port, the taxi driver showed us some monuments at which he stopped to let us take pictures. When we got back to the ship, and Daddy was paying the taxi driver, the taxi driver hid one of the bills and pretended like Daddy had not given him enough. Daddy had seen him do it so he did not give him another one. Here are some pictures:

An aqueduct built in the 18-century that the driver said the Romans built (but they did not)

Looking down the wall (you can see the ocean far out there)

Me standing next to the wall

The Castle from the bottom of the hill


The steep castle wall

Daddy talking about the castle

The Castle walls from inside the Castle

One of the Bastions

Some of the ramparts

Washington Day 1

Yesterday Daddy and I flew to Washington for a Men's Leadership Conference. We got up at 5:00 am to drive to Charlotte to get on the 1st leg of the flight at 9:40 am to San Francisco. The drive and the 1st leg of the flight were uneventful. The flight was very full and we were at the back so we were the last one's to get off the flight. We only had 22 min to get to the connecting gate which was in a different terminal on the other side of security so we ran through the airport, went through security again, ran through the rest of the airport and got to the gate seven minutes before the plane was supposed to leave but they close the gates ten minutes before the plane leaves so we did not get on. The person at the counter by the gate said that the plane had left when it was still sitting there! One good thing about that was that we got to have lunch and Daddy got to work more on his talk during the three hour wait for the next flight to Seattle. The flight to Seattle was uneventful but since we were late for the rental car we got a eight seater instead of a two seater. We were staying at the Bradricks which was a two hour drive from Seattle. On the way we stopped at an Arby's to get dinner. We arrived at their house about 9:00 pm their time and we stayed up about an hour talking.