"" Writer's Wanderings: Portugal - Cascais

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Portugal - Cascais

After visiting Sintra, our driver and guide took us down the mountain to the coastal area. We traveled along some beautiful coast line with lovely beach areas and into the resort area outside of Lisbon. The community we stopped in was Cascais.


We pulled into the Grande Real Villa Italia Hotel and Spa for refreshments. The hotel reserved the patio area for us that overlooks the pool and served us tea and coffee with an elegant assortment of small sandwiches and pastries including one that is a favorite in Portugal, Pastel de Nata. We saw several different versions of the pastry which is basically a custard filled treat. The hotel offered two: one that was more like a little custard spread between two pieces of a cookie-like pastry and the other, said to be the original recipe, was more like a pastry shell with custard filling. I'm sure there are as many variations as there are pastry chefs in Lisbon.


The hotel was beautiful and duly noted as a possible place to stay for a precruise experience (if we can afford the five-star prices). Hey, it was good enough for Microsoft to have a conference scheduled there. As we explored we found a conference room reserved for them.


Our next stop was the harbor area of Cascais. It doubles as a resort area and a fishing harbor--make that lobster trapping as you can see from all the traps stacked up on the dock.

As we drove through the main seaside road, I again wished for more time to explore. This is one of the reasons we like to cruise into places where we've not been. It gives us a taste of the country/city and if we are interested in further exploration, we can return on our own someday.


Driving back into Lisbon, we passed a fortress and of course more buildings with the decorative tiles adorning the outside. I'm sure the people who live/work in the buildings don't think anything of the tiles. Isn't that the way it is with most of us? We often don't appreciate what we have around us as being unique or interesting.

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