Lisbon

So Lisbon. What a picturesque city. We went for a wander earlier this week and visited the oceanarium for a good few hours of poking around.

It turns out there are hop-on / hop-off bus services here, so we picked up tickets for a couple of the lines and started exploring.

Day 2 of the tour bus rolled around, and we headed back into the Baixa district to hop on.

This is the Santa Justa Lift, built in the early 1900s.

After meandering around the central streets for a bit, the bus headed west along the Tagus. We had a few spots of rain at this point, but figured it'd just be a shower blowing through.

Boy, were we wrong. 8 miles out of town, it started to really come down.

And then it poured. This, believe it or not, is the Monument of Discoveries. About all we discovered is that an open top bus in the middle of February is the wrong place to be.

I don't even know what this is, it was raining so much by this point.

Anyway, that pretty much sums up the reason we're flying out of here in a couple of weeks to spend some time back in the UK. I'd rather be on the boat than living through another British winter, but we can't head south (HUGE waves in Nazare this weekend), we're out of season and the marinas are pretty dead, and I'd rather be killing time in an office, preparing for the Canaries and beyond, than twiddling my thumbs aboard.

Oh, and sitting back in the UK with broadband is infinitely more comfortable than perching in the salon when the tide goes out. I kid you not, this is one of the only berths in the marina where there's good wifi aboard, but of course at low tide three days a month (springs), it means we're slightly cock-eyed. Just slightly. The price one has to pay for facebook.