By: Karen Rubel, a Marvelous Mouse Travels agent
The nice thing about ABD trips is that they take care of everything for you! When changing hotels, we just packed up our suitcases and they will make sure it gets from our room at one hotel directly to our room at the new hotel later that day (so easy!). After breakfast at the hotel, we took a ~3 hour drive to Lisbon. Our guides pre-planned a restroom break at a very nice and clean stop, and had snacks and water for us on the drive. Actually, bottled water was available ALL the time – I never wanted water and didn’t have it available to me the whole trip. On the drive we watched a movie (we voted to watch Coco), had some storytelling, and learned about the area, including what scenery we were looking at, including cork, eucalyptus, and olive trees! I never would have known what these were if we were traveling on our own!
When we arrived in Lisbon, we first had a restroom break where you had to pay 50 cent (Euro) coins to use it. Our guides are prepared with EVERYTHING and handed out coins as we left the bus to make sure everyone is taken care of. These are the details that just continue throughout the whole trip to make sure everything is super smooth and you don’t have to worry about anything! We boarded a catamaran and cruised on the Tagus River for about an hour with snacks and drinks included as a nice touch.
After cruising for about an hour, we pulled up to our waterfront restaurant where we enjoyed a Portuguese lunch of “cod and scrambled eggs”. There were several choices, but I needed to try this interesting dish!
The afternoon was filled with sightseeing around Lisbon, including the Jeronimos Monastery & Cloister (where our guides helped us skip a line over 30 minutes long), Belem Tower, and Monument to the Discoveries. We also saw the plane that made the first south Atlantic crossing (to Brazil), 100 years ago in 1922!
It has been a long (but wonderful) day at this point. We head to our new home for the next 3 nights, Tivoli Avenida Liberdade Lisboa, which is located on the very nice shopping street (reminded me of Paris). It was a magical feeling to walk into our room and find some Disney-themed chocolates with a bottle of port wine to welcome us!
Our adventure was adults-only, but if there were children on this trip, this would have been the night they would have their own dinner with a movie and special activities. Separately, adults had an included dinner at the hotel restaurant. The chocolate mousse for dessert was so fun as the server shaved multiple kinds of chocolate right at the table!
Like all mornings, we started with an included breakfast in our hotel. As this was a new hotel, it was fun to try the different offerings, including the omelet station.
We hopped onto tuk-tuks outside of our hotel and spent the morning with a specialized guide who gave us an art/graffiti tour of different neighborhoods in Lisbon. I think I took about 50 pictures of all of the art we saw – it was just so cool! The differentiating part of seeing this through ABD, is that they hire an artist guide who talks about the art and artists from a different point of view than even our guides could give us. Our tuk-tuks also took us to the top of the highest hill in Lisbon for us to have a birds-eye view over the city!
Our tuk-tuks dropped us of at the LX Factory where we continued the art tour on foot, and ended at a local restaurant. This was my favorite lunch of the whole trip! It was multi-course (like every meal that was provided on this adventure), as it is customary in Portugal to have a small breakfast and then a large, multi-course lunch and dinner. We started with bread service (both “regular” and gluten-free. Those at our table who were gluten free said it was the best gluten-free bread they had in their lives! Next up was salad, followed by pigs cheek, and the best dessert on the whole trip – essentially yogurt with fruit, but it had something magical to it!
After lunch we had some free time to explore the area, including tons of cute small/local shops. I particularly liked the bookshop and the sardine shop. We also bought some souvenirs at a cork shop and a jewelry store where the jeweler was making new pieces in front of us.
It was getting warm by this time in the afternoon, and our guides were intuitive enough to know that some people were getting tired (although no one said this or complained), they are just that good! They gave us options – hike up a steep hill to a castle, go back to the hotel for rest/pool time, or stay in the area for more shopping. Our group split up pretty much into thirds for all of these, so it was so nice to give options!
We later all reconvened at the hotel and took smaller buses to dinner – a local spot with Portuguese dishes. Our normal large bus couldn’t navigate the narrow streets so we had this alternative instead! Our meal was delicious and started with an appetizer we saw probably around 4 times throughout our adventure, which we designated as “fish sticks”. I enjoyed trying them at different locations as it is popular, but restaurants put their own spin on it.
Today was the group’s consensus as the best day on the adventure (at least so far)! We started with a later breakfast in the hotel after sleeping in, and then traveled to the End of the World!! This is the westernmost part of Portugal and continental Europe. The spot as at the top of a cliff with normally gorgeous views, but it was cloudy and WINDY, which made for one of the most memorable and fun moments of the trip. Our whole group couldn’t stop laughing!
The next stop was lunch, which had a beautiful view of the Atlantic Ocean. This was a meal we were waiting for since we heard about it the first night of the trip – white fish with bananas! It was nothing I had heard of before and wasn’t too sure, but it was good and something I would have again.
After lunch we had an amazing time riding e-bikes to the town of Cascais, where our local guide lives! The bike ride had breathtaking views of the ocean, and was an easy 1-hour ride, with a stop in the middle for water and an opportunity to take pictures. For those that chose not to ride a bike, they stopped around halfway on the bus to get out and cheer us along!
Once we finished our bike ride, we did a short walking tour in Cascais with a special surprise stop at what is considered the best ice cream in Portugal! This was a magical extra thrown in and everyone got to choose a cup or cone with 1 or 2 flavors. Yum!
From there, we headed to the town of Sintra up in the hills and saw a change in both temperature and cloud coverage. It felt to me like we were going through the mist into a special place, just like in Frozen II. 😊 We had the opportunity for some shopping and dinner on our own (at our own cost). Many people opted to skip dinner, but we stopped at a local restaurant our guides pointed out, for a quick slice of pizza and some local beer. Before we ate, our guide walked us to a jewelry shop since many on the adventure were looking for Portuguese filigree, and made sure we had options to buy (which I did)!
The last activity for the day was a “capstone” event – a private, after-hours, tour of Pena Palace! This palace in Sintra is one of the most visited attractions in all of Portugal. Our local guide was telling us that any time she takes a group, even with special “group tickets”, it is a minimum 3-hour wait. It is just that popular, and Adventures by Disney arranged for us to have the whole place to ourselves!! To add to the fun, our guides told stories and had volunteers from the group “act it out” to increase the engagement and fun of this once-in-a-lifetime experience!
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