Beauty and the Beard:
Bound to Wander

We started Day 7 with hotel breakfast, which has become one of the great stabilizing forces of this trip. Wake up, eat eggs and bread and whatever pastry seems least mysterious, then figure out what version of the plan survives contact with reality. After breakfast, we left our bags at the front desk and walked about 15 minutes to see Évora’s aqueducts. The aqueducts are around 500 years old, which is impressive, although we heard “aqueduct” and kind of expected Roman. These were not Roman. It turns out people have built impressive old infrastructure during other periods of history too. Who knew!? They were still very cool. The best part is that Évora just kind of absorbed them into the city. Buildings are built right into the arches. People walk under them. Cars squeeze through them in lanes that seem designed mostly to test your confidence and side mirrors. It’s the kind of thing that would be fenced off and over-explained in a lot of places, but here it’s just part of the neighborho...

Today was Kaylea’s birthday, and thanks to our hot air balloon ride getting canceled, we got to start it the luxurious way: by sleeping in. All in all, not the worst consolation prize. We had a slow breakfast at the hotel, then headed into Évora to see the cathedral. On the way there, we wandered through a little market street full of shops selling things made out of cork. Purses, hats, wallets, shoes, postcards, bowties, probably a full cork suit if you looked hard enough. Portugal takes cork seriously. When we got to the cathedral, we found out the entrance was cash only, so we had to go find an ATM. But we came back. We are nothing if not determined tourists when there is a cathedral roof on the line. The cathedral ended up being one of the highlights of the day. They let you climb up onto the roof, which sounds more exclusive than it is because they let everyone do it, but still. They let us onto the roof. To get there, we climbed one of those tight, winding spiral staircases that ...

We woke up on time. Finally. After several days of travel chaos, jet lag, accidental naps, and general time-zone confusion, this felt like a major personal victory. We made it to breakfast relatively on time and were feeling pretty good about ourselves. At breakfast, we got a little bad news for future us. Our hot air balloon ride for the next day had been canceled because of the wind. That was supposed to be our big Évora birthday plan. Kaylea loves heights and has never been in an untethered balloon and the idea of travel across the inner Portuguese country side had us humble bragging for weeks ahead of time. We must've forgotten to knock on wood each time. Instead, tomorrow was now going to become spontaneous exploration day. The hot air balloon company also let us know over email that one of Aaron’s phone numbers was not working. Unfortunately, that was the same phone number we had given to all of our hotels. So that's awesome. It'll probably work out. But that was tomo...

 Aaron woke up at 2:45 a.m., which is generally not when anyone wants to start their day, but here we were. He eventually managed to fall back asleep again from 7:30 to 9:30, which was less of a nap and more of a second, deeply confusing bedtime. Kaylea, meanwhile, slept for a solid 13 hours, like a champ. So the day started slowly. We had a lazy breakfast, worked on the blog for a bit, and eventually rallied enough to do the thing we had planned to do the night before: walk up to the castle. It was only about a 15-minute walk from our hotel, but mostly stairs. If you're thinking of coming to Lisbon at any point in the next few years, start working the Stair-master now. Trust us. But the castle was worth it. This castle easily made our top 10 castle list, which is not an official list, but probably should be. It had everything you want from a castle: stone walls, dramatic views, canons, towers, winding paths, a ditch that looked like it could have been a moat. It had everything. Al...

When we left off, we were sitting in the airport lounge waiting for our second attempt at getting to Lisbon. Honestly, the lounge was actually super nice and quiet, so we got a little work done and Kaylea managed to squeeze in a nap. About 40 minutes before boarding, Kaylea changed into pajamas with the full plan of immediately passing out the second we got into our seats. Which sounded great in theory. Except boarding was kind of a nightmare. Our gate was literally the very last gate in the terminal. Like a solid 20-minute speed walk from the lounge, and by the time we got there, the vibes were already bad. We had gotten rebooked into separate seats, and apparently half the plane had too because multiple people kept asking us if we’d switch seats so they could sit with their spouses. Somehow though, we lucked out. Another couple was in basically the exact same setup we were. Aaron was behind the husband and Kaylea was behind the wife, so we swapped seats with them and ended up sit...

We were supposed to wake up in Lisbon. Instead, we woke up near Dulles Airport with no luggage, no clean clothes, and a new mission: squeeze as much DC as possible out of one accidental layover day without missing our second chance at Portugal. The plan was simple. Get clean clothes. Find food. Hit the National Mall. See as much of DC as we could in the few hours we had. Then, most importantly, get to our flight on time. We were about ten minutes from the closest Target, forty minutes from DC, and ten minutes from the airport. Our flight wasn’t until 10:30 p.m., so technically, we had time. Then we woke up late. It had taken us a while to get settled the night before. We had to call our first hotel in Lisbon and let them know that, despite the fact that our flight had arrived on time, we had not arrived with it. Instead, we would be showing up the next day. By 9 a.m., we realized we'd probably be skipping breakfast in favor of making a quick Target run and maybe grab some snacks th...

We were ready. Bags packed. House clean. Bedsheets changed. Floors vacuumed. The kind of pre-vacation preparedness that makes you feel like you might finally be becoming real adults. We were on time. But alas, the winds were not in our favor. Quite literally. Storms rolled in from the west right as we were heading to the airport. Somehow, we still made it there in mostly light sprinkles and even managed to get from the parking garage to the terminal without getting rained on. Check-in was easy. Security didn’t even pull Aaron aside for additional screening, which honestly felt suspiciously lucky. That was about where our luck ran out. To preface all of this: our flight to Lisbon had a 65-minute layover in DC. It was already going to be tight. Once we got to the airline lounge, we quickly realized we might be in trouble. The place was packed with stressed-out people staring at their phones, pacing around, and loudly explaining their travel disasters to anyone within earshot. Apparently ...