It is our holidays; we’ll be having a short break in Lisbon. This is the first day off work for at least ten weeks and I need the break. Most of Monday morning was taken up on my laptop, checking conditions for entry to Portugal, printing Covid passes, passenger locator forms, boarding passes, ordering taxis and the Bristol Airport carpark, printing the reservation details for the hotel, getting a mask exemption for the plane – all exhausting.

With showers forecast later in the week, I managed to get the bonfire lit and cleared a couple of piles of debris built up over the winter. It is always a good feeling once the pile disappears and the area behind the stable block looks a bit clearer.

There were a few phone calls to catch up on. Keith can now order the slates for the North facing elevation of the stable block, it looks as if the scaffolding will go up before Easter and Keith and his team aim to start work the following week. I confirmed the delivery of the fireplace for next week, and with Rod who will come and install it. I reminded them that it should be Brazilian slate for the hearth and insets rather than black granite, I would have much preferred it if they had altered the details of the quote, but the change never materialised. I got hold of our local decorator, Paul, and he will come to strip the wallpaper in the living room at the beginning of May, now I need to arrange for the floor to be sanded and sealed. I was too optimistic when I thought we would get the redecorating of the playroom and kitchen done by the end of April, June looks much more realistic now.

I added a couple more book reviews to the new Paperback Secrets page and I published My Podcast Journey Week 12. I’m a little behind with the weekly diary, I’ll need to give this some focus and try and catch-up at the weekend. It was an industrious Monday.

We dropped Reggie and Badger at June and Martin’s on the way to Bristol Airport, we hate leaving Reggie, but June keeps us well informed with the occasional photo or video.

I was relieved that nobody challenged my lack of mask wearing once I had found my seat, I could hear the stewardess saying to others that they needed to put their mask on, perhaps the exemption was working, either that or the sunflower lanyard was doing the trick. Once we had touched down at Lisbon airport, I put the mask on before getting on the bus to take us to the terminal, what a long journey it was. Victoria kept whispering take the mask off, and eventually I did and felt much better after 5 minutes once the blood was circulating again as we walked to baggage reclaim. I did check the heart rate on the Fitbit, as we were waiting at Passport Control, and I would have guessed something higher than the 89 bpm. Some perspective is needed here, my normal resting rate is 57 bpm and as I write this it is currently showing 54 beats per minute.

We expected to find a sign with our name on it once we had reached arrivals, but it was nowhere to be seen. I eventually got through on the emergency number and our taxi driver found us. He showed us the sign with our name on it, it would have helped if they had a printer which was not running out of ink. It was now rush hour and the taxi probably took twice the normal length of time. We made it to our hotel room at the Intercontinental shortly after 6:00p.m. The whole break should be relatively cheap, the hotel room uses some of the IHG Reward Points I had accumulated over several years of living out of a suitcase.

It was still light when we walked down Avenida da Liberdade, one of the most expensive shopping streets in Europe, not that we were window gazing. We walked through the Baixa district down to the river front and found a massive berthed P&O cruise liner that steered us in the opposite direction. We had a very nice dinner at Porter Bistro on Rua do Arsenal, we later found out it was part of the Corpo Santo hotel. Just under €90 for two with a bottle of Monólogo Avesso White 2020 which we rated 4.2 out of 5. The walk back up hill to the Intercontinental took 15 minutes longer than the 30 minutes stroll down to sea level.

Fitbit badges greeted me on Wednesday morning. In the ten weeks since my birthday I’ve walked the length of the London Underground at just over 400km, I’ve climbed the height of 1,000 floors or the height of a skydive, the Kevin badge was awarded at 22,222 steps in a day, and another badge for going past 25,000 steps. Last Sunday, the 27th March had given me a new target to beat, 25,641 steps, will it be today?

The Botanical Gardens of Lisbon was our first port of call, which allowed me to dispense with some Euro coins collected from trips made to Breda two years before, but for €6 for the two of us, it was less than I thought. It was warm and sunny, and the gardens were worth visiting, and hopefully some interesting snaps were taken. Next stop was heading towards the Time Out market which we found to be a food hall and no doubt a Covid hotspot. We had stopped at a small cafe on the way, tea for Victoria, and a small bottle or red for me as the sun was now over the yardarm.

After a minute in the Time Out market we avoided several offers for a rickshaw ride to any destination, hmm, I doubt very much it would be uphill, and we decided to walk to our next destination, Belém, and after an hour we took one stop on the train. In hindsight we would have gone the whole way by train as there was very little to see along the front, Lisbon hasn’t exploited the riverside in the same way that other cities do, and the railway and parallel road creates an unnatural barrier.

It had been suggested to us by one of the teachers at Victoria’s school that the Coach Museum was worth a visit. The old site was next to the Presidential palace with its two uniformed guards, who stomp from box to box when they get bored. Nice looking orange trees in the palace gardens above our heads. There must have been 50+ coaches across the two sites, the new site has the more extensive display. There seems to have been a lot of princesses, or they regularly had a new coach. Some of the coaches would have required equally magnificent horses to pull the heavy wood carvings around, I think some of the coaches can’t have been designed for anything other than a short ceremonial journey. No doubt travellers 200 years or more ago would have received several bruises on their journeys despite the thickness of the seat cushions.

The Tropical Botanical Gardens was a waste of time unless you have children under six who might enjoy the Alice in Wonderland theme park. We were told that the gate closed in half an hour at 5:00p.m., seems this is because they were getting ready for illuminating the gardens at night, we managed a nauseous 15 minutes.

After a short wait to get in at the nearby and famous Pastéis de Belém, the home of the Portuguese custard tart, we had a very pleasant afternoon tea in their small garden with a cool breeze, looking in at the 200+ people seated in the tearoom. Unfortunately, there had been a run on the cakes and the choice was limited, opting for “well, whatever you have left” rather than picking another choice to hear that it too was no longer available. The half-bottle of Vinho Verde was very nice as we rested our legs and pondered whether to take the taxi or return via the train and the walk back up hill.

We declined the taxi ride and increased the step count and floors climbed as we retraced our steps from the morning stopping for a beer and a half in the small park which we had passed over 6 hours earlier, by then any half decent street kiosk would have been fine. There were no likely candidates for dinner in the streets around the hotel, and so we opted for the hotel bar after resting up for an hour, or so.

It was not a new high-water mark for steps, the Kevin badge would have been awarded again, but in the morning a new badge awaited me, the Ferris Wheel for endurance over 75 floors, although the actual was 108 floors and 17.5km of ground covered, I had slept well.

On Thursday, the last day of our mini break, we headed out of Lisbon to Sintra, everyone on the train leaving Rossio station had the same idea. This 40-minute journey is better enjoyed with a good book, the vision on the other side of the glass window was mile after mile of apartment blocks and an endless spread of graffiti, some of which was still sporting its 1980’s signature, I suppose something for the artist to show his/her grandchildren.

Quinta da Regaleira is a hillside garden where the visitor route takes you through one floor of the house. It is studded with interesting follies, grottoes, and wells, a once tranquil setting, but alas for us it was punctuated by teenage peacocks constantly making their mating calls to the unimpressed of their respective groups. There were plenty of photo opportunities which Victoria managed to achieve as I waited for a little red riding hood to disappear behind a rock or a mother and push chair deciding to adopt a circular path in my field of vision. Did the mother really think I wanted to take a photo of them?

Sintra is very interesting and worth an overnight stay, or two, there seems to be a large number of walks with interesting architecture wherever you look. A few houses looked to be developing a degree of decay, either too expensive to maintain, or part of family squabbles over inheritance rights. There are small alleys between the houses, tourist shops and cafes, bars and restaurants. Lord Byron visited in 1808 and the bar with bragging rights is still in operation and milking the connection.

Late afternoon before reaching the Sintra railway station we stopped for a tea, coffee, and shared cake in a lovely clean cafe, for the princely sum of €3.90. How is this possible? It makes you wonder whether a common currency across Europe benefits those who live in Northern Europe and have disposable income to the detriment of the southern countries, like Portugal, with limited natural resources except for fishing and tourism. A litre of diesel is just as expensive in Portugal as elsewhere in Europe, according to our taxi driver, but much harder for the average family to fill the tank than their European neighbours.

In the evening we found a restaurant relatively close to the hotel and had another nice dinner. Steps and climbs would have warranted a second Ferris Wheel badge.

Our overall impression of Lisbon was that it is worth a short-break visit, probably four rather than three nights because two of the days should be taken with trips out to Belem and Sintra. Like all city breaks a bit of research will pay dividends. We are wondering whether there are other areas that we did not visit where we should have found the time, or where we could have returned using a different route, even if that requires a short taxi journey first. Your money will go a long way, so there is no point skimping.

On Friday we were up early hoping to beat everyone to breakfast, not so, a coach load of elderly American tourists beat us to it, tossing the coin to see if breakfast opened early and winning. From my observation they were not trying to balance the food on their plate but seemed content in ensuring that a small portion of everything could be strategically positioned so that each did not contaminate its neighbour. A culinary work of art helped if you position the muffin with its paper case in the center of the plate.

The dogs were incredibly pleased to see us when we picked them up from June and Martin’s, running around in circles over their rockery and launching themselves at us with tails wagging furiously. It was much colder than Lisbon and we lit the fire each evening and generally took it easy over the weekend.

I didn’t play golf as customary on Sunday, it wouldn’t have been a pleasant experience. So, I spent more hours than I should copying over old paperback reviews to ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’ website, all twenty-six reviews that I had published. Seems that there are half a dozen others that were left partly complete, and hence remained in draft state which I should copy over and complete some time, this is far from being a priority.

I’ve been using the Microsoft Editor, an extension to Google Chrome, and it works well. I think better to have it than not, it may need tuning to my writing style if that is possible.

March was a good month for the stats on Maximo Secrets topping out at 26,451 views and 7,290 visitors. My previous best had been the same month last year, but I hadn’t quite reached 24,000 views and barely made 6,500 visitors. Year-on-year a good rise, but these new records might prove difficult to beat.

I mixed two more cocktails on Sunday evening, A Singapore Sling for Victoria and a Black Russian for me. The Singapore Sling is one of Victoria’s favourites. A Black Russian is simple, 2 parts Vodka to 1 part Kahlua but for me only a 3.5 out of 5, I think next time I’ll try half and half.