The football match last night was a great success. We (Benfica) won.
This morning we were collected early for a trip to Sintra. We were just a mini bus full which is more comfortable than clambering in and out of a large bus and some of the roads we drove were too small and snakey for a regular bus.
At Sintra we were not given time to go into the old summer palace whose kitchens I remember fondly. We were whisked off to the palace built in Victorian times by the husband of the queen who couldn’t speak Portuguese and created a Neo Gothic, Neo Manueline, Neo Romantic palace on the top of a hill which must have been the inspiration for the Disneyland palace. Inside (no photos allowed) it was a collection of small, interconnecting rooms full of overdecorated furniture. They had dining room chairs exactly the same as Mum’s! All too very OTT for me. 
That was where we lost Fi. She knew where she was, of course. But we lingered on a parapet where she couldn’t see us so she assumed that we had started down the hill to the car park. Naturally the menfolk fussed and fiddled and made everybody late.
We then went to the most westerly point on continental Europe: Cap de Roche. The legend is that a mother bear was told to go north with the retreating ice of the last ice age. She refused and the gods turned her and her cubs into rocks. The headland was covered with flowers: pig face, lavender, short thistles, portulacea like ones, very pretty. And it had the first lighthouse of about 6 that we saw on the way down the coast to Cascais and Estoril.
The blow hole at Hell’s mouth was impressive although it wasn’t blowing today.
Dinner was topped off by this beautiful orange.
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