Coimbra to Rome

I loved sitting on the terrace on top the hotel in the evening watching the darkness come and the lights go on.

The day was exhausting. I went to the post office to mail postcards to the grandkids and then we headed to the train station around the corner. We had taxied to the hotel when we arrived since we had no idea where we were going, but on the way back we were confident to take the local train to connect to the Lisbon train. Steve had upgraded out tickets to first class. Ah, that all our travel were so comfortable! At the station we went two floors down to the metro which went directly to the airport. (The Portuguese don't seem to have figured out how much easier an escalator is with luggage than stairs. The one in the picture is coming up.) 

It took almost an hour to get through security. If there was air-conditioning, it was totally inadequate. One woman threw up, no doubt from the heat. She was clearly aiming for the waste basket, but missed. Half an hour later when we finally got to the front, the mess had still not been cleaned up. To be fair, they may not have known it was there. In the confusion over lack of bins and slow lines and everyone having to wait if someone needed to be frisked, I certainly forgot to tell them there was a mess on the floor back there. Then the bathroom floor was littered with paper towels and toilet paper and I won't say what was sticking out of the bin in the stall. That was after another long wait. When I came out, Steve still hadn't gotten in. Someone was cleaning so the men's was closed.

All that before we got on the plane.

We waited on the taxiway for 20 minutes to avoid a thunder storm in Rome. We needn't have bothered. A medical emergency forced us to land in Valencia, Spain, to take off a man who thought he was having a heart attack. Only the people Steve talked to who had been helping said they thought it was a panic attack. He had been acting weird earlier. Taking someone off the plane meant identifying all the luggage to be sure nothing had been left on that shouldn't be. Then it also involved paperwork for landing unscheduled in another country. We were two hours on the ground. Last I saw the man, he was being questioned and his luggage gone over by the police, not medical personnel.

It was nearly midnight when we got to our Rome hotel. At least we didn't have connections to make like the young woman across the aisle who was headed for Cairo, leaving about the time we landed in Rome.