Day 5

Wednesday August 1

Not too many pics from this day, check out the ones I got here

7:50am BST - woke up after not a great night's sleep. Don't know why. Anyway today we are on our way to Lisbon. Of course, the flight leaves at 5pm but we have to be out of the B&B at 10am, so we will get to the airport SUPER DUPER EARLY. If there was something left to do in town then I'm sure we could've left our luggage there for a while, but really, there wasn't. LOL.

10:30am BST - So after breakfast we finished packing up and quickly walked to the store for some lunch food and we were on our way. Got a ticket for the Birmingham International - the airport's train station. Had to get off at Birmingham Moor Street and walk to Birmingham New Street to get a 10 min train to the airport station - the walk was only a few min between stations. I am thinking that my Keen shoes will end up being a lot more comfy than my Adidas ones because yesterday in my Keens we walked all over Chipping Campden and my feet were ok but today just a little bit of walking and my feet started to hurt!

12noon BST - made it to the Birmingham International train station. It was so quiet we figured it'd be easy to eat our lunch there than at the airport since we didn't know what would be available to us at the airport but outside security. So we ate for a while and took the 2 minute monorail-type thing from the train station to the terminal - it was quite easy really. I realized that even though it might look silly, pulling the straps tighter on my backpack makes it hurt less on my shoulders. So hopefully that will be a bit better from now on.

1:00pm BST - so we check in, get our seat assignments, etc., and have 4 hours until our flight leaves LOL!! I just think to myself that I hope checking in so early won't increase the likelihood that our luggage would get lost since they won't immediately have the plane to put it on. Oh well. So we ended up finding a big food court area outside security where Amanda could finish her beloved Diet Coke LOL.

2:00pm BST - decided to finally go through security, where my silly can of mixed nuts alerted them. The security guards and us had a pretty good laugh about it. Once we figured out it was the can of nuts in my backpack that was setting off the security, I opened the can and offered the security agents some LOL!!! So when we get to Lisbon tonight I think I will transfer them to a ziploc bag to avoid having that problem again ;) the departure terminal at the Birmingham airport is interesting - it is like a circular mall area with some shops and food places and the gates all branch out in wings off the center area. TV boards all over the place give the departure and gate info. It's so early that our flight doesn't even have a gate assignment yet LOL. So we figure out that we have just over 1.50 pounds left and that we shouldn't waste it, so we walked around to find what that would buy us. Of course along the way here I am walking with my passport and boarding pass in my hand and I look down and see my passport in my hand but not the boarding pass. Swears start flying out of my mouth and amanda looks back a few feet and sees it on the ground. Thank god!! I decided to put it in my bag after that ;) So then we found that for 1.45 we could get a chocolate muffin, so we got it and split it and it was quite tasty. Now we have about 13 pence to our name. Not too shabby.

9:30pm GMT - finally arrived in Lisbon. LIS Airport is a wacky place, considering it is a major city. There was no jetway, we had to walk down the stairs, then we were whisked away by bus to the terminal, which at about 8:30pm was dead as a doornail. The guy at passport control literally just stamped our passports and shoved us through. Got our luggage really quickly, hooray! Went to the tourist information desk and bought our LisboaCards for transportation and admission into a ton of museums. She gave us the student price even though I wasn't a student aw how nice! We asked about the Taxi voucher and she said it would be more expensive than just going out in the taxi line, so we did that, but it ended up being 22 euros or about 10-12 more euros than we thought. So like we get out of the cab and there is this mass of people around Hard Rock Cafe. Limo and cameras and crowds. I live right near freaking Hollywood and can't see a celebrity and I'm in Lisbon for about 15 minutes and I see some celebrity, possibly named Hugo, arriving with a pretty woman. We'll just say for the sake of arguing that it was TEH FACE.

10:00pm GMT - finally made it to the Residencial Florescente - looks very nice in the lobby, got our key and went up. The halls are narrow and lined with the typical Portuguese tiles - very nice. The room…is nicely-sized and thankfully off the main street on a little quiet courtyard (see pic of the staircase on an adjacent building), but it is a little ragged around the edges. The bathroom is big, but a little bizarre. The beds are quite hard but not too bad, there is enough light, and even some places to sit. The TV is small and hung up high on the wall, and thankfully gets CNN International and Eurosport. There are plenty of outlets to charge and use things, and the a/c is controlled via remote and it works quite well, thankfully. It is missing some small touches like a clock and tissues, but other than that for 80 euros you can't really beat it. We are tired, but we are hungry, so we set out in our area to find some place to eat.

11:30pm GMT - after wandering aimlessly around to see most places closing and putting their patio tables in for a night, we finally found a place near us to eat called Sol Dourado - our waiter was Carlos and he was nice and spoke English hooray! We didn't want anything too heavy so I had the grilled chicken. It was a half a chicken with fries and rice. VERY TASTY mmmmmmmmmmm. After waiting quite some time to finally get the check, we got it and managed to make it back here. We were soo tired so we went to bed. We are glad that all our other flights are earlier in the day so we won't waste a whole day and arrive to the next place so late. It was a waste of a whole day and kind of a drag.