cascais and sintra, portugal

Our little day trip to Cascais and Sintra didn't go exactly as planned. In fact, it was pretty much the worst day ever. There were just too many transportation connections that we needed to make, and I think we were a little too ambitious with our planning. We had to take a 45 min train to Cascais, then a 1 hour bus to Sintra, then rely on the bus to take us to the different stops within Sintra.

We had great weather, and Cascais was really beautiful. We wandered around there for about an hour, and saw these huge jellyfish that had washed up on the beach there. We caught our bus to Sintra, where we planned on visiting the three palaces/castles they have there. The sights in Sintra were fairly spread out, and there was a bus that ran between each sight every 20 minutes. By the time we got there, we only had about 2.5 hours until we had to head back, because that was the night we were meeting Vera again to go to Santo Antonio. We ended up not being able to really see any of the sights because we would have get right back on the next bus if we wanted to see everything. Basically we had only 20 min at each stop. The Moorish Castle remains were especially cool; very amazon jungly and we were able to wander around the ruins. That is until we reached the actual entrance part and realized we didn't have a ticket. They shouldn't have let us even come that far if you needed a ticket.. ugh! So we didn't get to see much of that either before having to hop back on the next bus. It was the same deal for the next palace. No time. We got back down to the main town and waited for the bus that would take us back to Cascais. We got on the bus and made it no problem, but the doors wouldn't close so the driver couldn't drive that bus. Everyone had to get off while we waited for a new replacement bus.

By the time we got back to the hostel and grabbed our packs, we only had like 20 minutes until our bus with Vera left. She had shown us exactly where to go the other night when she was with us, the only problem was we couldn't remember for the life of us WHICH metro stop to get off at. We thought we had the right one, but when we go off it looked unfamiliar for some reason so we got back on and tried some other stops, frantically looking for the bus station. It turned out we DID have the right stop the first time, but by the time we figured that out we had missed meeting Vera by about 15 minutes. What crummy luck. We borrowed someone's cell phone (pay phone was broken - go figure) and called Vera, apologising profusely. Luckily there was another bus we could catch at 10:30pm, and she said she would wait for us on her end once she got there. We felt SO bad for making her have to wait around for us, because it was a difference of about 2 hours.