Yes – we still want to move to Portugal! After 2 and half weeks of research and touring, we feel like we have barely scratched the surface of a fascinating and delightful country. We are very anxious to make the move, settle in, and get to know the place. We know there will be things we don’t love about it and tons we will miss (mostly family & friends), but we believe the positives will out-weigh the negatives.

Knowing we’d be returning to Lisboa, we did not feel the usual pressure to do much on the last day. We opted to take a bus to the far west side of town to a trendy area of shops and restaurants called the LxFactory. We loved it. Great, upscale original shops and many wonderful eateries. For Charlotte folks, picture a much better, more authentic version of NoDa.

We wandered the shops knowing we could not buy anything as we didn’t have any spare room in our carry-on bags. We also didn’t want to take anything back just to have to move it in a few months. We stopped for a late lunch at a cute outdoor cafe. The word “cheesecake” in the name was all Wayne needed to know.  We shared an excellent risotto with chicken & brie, then – big surprise – cheese cakes (which we did not share.) 

Back at our apartment, while packing all our filthy clothes, we felt obligated to drink the white wine our host had left for us. Plus the red wine Wayne had bought since, of course, we couldn’t take it home with us. 

During the time at the apartment, we saw medics in the street below doing chest compressions on some poor soul for quite a long time. We aren’t certain, but think the person was still alive when they finally loaded them into the ambulance to transport. Scary.

Dinner was just down (literally) the street at a place called Nova Wine Bar. It was cute, the tapas was very good, and wine pretty good. The service was awful. Disappointing, but not enough to spoil a great trip.

The next morning, up early, we took an Uber to the airport to avoid schlepping luggage on a bus. Our flight to Philly was on time and super-crowded. The flight west is always easier than the east flight overnight. I got over four hours of battery life out of my laptop to edit photos which helped kill time. Our connection was smooth. We got home and managed to stay up until 9:30 (2:30 to us) so we could be back on schedule the next day to get a jump on our visa application process!