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Beautiful Scenery |
After walking the coastal road on our
first day in Cascais, and seeing the lovely bike lanes all along the
way, we decided to rent bikes and pedal up the coast today. The
fellow who looks after the apartment also rents bikes for a very
reasonable price, so we picked up two good bikes and took off for the
day.
Riding bikes along the coastal road is
great, the bike lanes are clearly marked and although you sometimes
have share with walkers (They do have their own sidewalk . . .), it
makes for an easy worry free ride. Not so much in town . . . . narrow
streets, one way streets, pedestrians, etc, make riding in the town a
bit more challenging, but we only had to get from the rental place to
the coast and we made it without incident.
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Great Views on the ride |
Riding the coast really was lovely. The
bike lanes are convenient and the terrain was level. Once you get out
of town, there are actually not a lot of places to stop. The scenery
is spectacular and we covered over 16 km in total. I did stop once to
look at an oddly shaped wall in the middle of a field on top of a
cliff. The wall was protecting people from falling down a hole into a
cave which was washed with waves from the ocean. Very deep, so the
wall was a good idea.
It was lunchtime about 7 km out, so we
decided to have lunch and turn around. There were a few
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Michelin Signs |
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Regis' Crab |
restaurants
in a cluster at this spot. One was closed (Portuguese Mondays),
another only served to hotel guests, but another had a nice “Open”
sign on the door along with MANY Michelin stickers. There were no
Michelin Stars, just
“Recommendations”, but this should have
given me pause. We walked in in our shorts and T-shirts, and while
being looked up and down were asked if we had “Reservations”.
This was in a large restaurant with perhaps six people seated in one
section. We replied to the negative and asked if we could have lunch.
We were led way across the restaurant to a table well away from the
“Real” guests. The menu was a shock with one item, “Lagostins”
(That's crawfish in English) at 220 euro a Kg. When the waiter came
over and we pointed out a couple of items on the menu, he suggested
that clients usually chose their meal from a basket of fresh catch
that would be brought to your table for you to choose. No thanks, I
did not want to accidentally choose one of those 220 euro per kg of
crayfish. We insisted that the items we chose from the menu were
adequate.
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Biking Home! |
Now once they realized that we actually
did want lunch and we were not going to be intimated by attitude, we
got along famously. I ordered a squid appetizer, cooked in butter
with garlic, and a tenderloin sandwich, and Regis ordered a crab
appetizer. The Squid was cooked perfectly, and I am an expert on
squid, and Regis' crab was delicious (And she commented that it was
the first time she actually got enough bread to spread the carb on).
All in all it was a great lunch! It was obviously an up-scale place
and we ended up with two servers waiting on us, and they were very
attentive but by the time we were finished we were joking and
laughing together. His phone buzzed in his apron and he was very
embarrassed, but I just brushed it off. He asked me if I wanted
another beer and I told him I was biking and did not want to drink
and drive. Then when he took my VISA for the bill, he noticed my
name. “Oh!” he exclaimed, “Arthur . .this is my son's name
too!”.
Leaving the restaurant feeling
satisfied, and perhaps a bit more upper-class, we remounted our
trusty bikes and heads held high biked home.