I first travelled to Portugal in 2012 when I was living in London. It was the very first holiday I took with Seth and we travelled to the Algarve, Lisbon, and the island of Madeira in the span of a week. I only wrote one blog post about it, which you can find below. More recently I returned to Portugal with Emily and we spent some time in Lisbon and Sintra, before flying to the other Portuguese islands of the Azores! I still haven’t visited Northern Portugal, but I feel very lucky to have been to both Madeira and the Azores and highly recommend either destination.

Portugal BlogRoll

From the Algarve to Madeira – After I finished work in London in April, Seth came to visit me for a few days and then we took off to Portugal for a week. I’m not really sure where I got the idea that I should spend my vacation in Portugal – I’d heard lots of good things about Spain and so I thought if I was to visit Spain, maybe I would visit Portugal as well. However, after a quick google search of Portuguese attractions, my interest in visiting Portugal… read more

Taylor Swift in Lisbon – It’s been a very eventful year for me from a traveling perspective. I went to Patagonia in mid-February with Seth and then 3 months later I took another 2 weeks off to go traveling with Emily. Our original plan had been to go to Greece last September, but then something came up and we cancelled that trip. So I ended up with two major trips back-to-back, which was somewhat overwhelming, but also awesome, so I can’t complain… read more

A Day in Sintra – It would have been nice to sleep in after our Taylor Swift concert, but our travel time was too limited and we had too much to see! We didn’t get up super early, but we wanted to go to Sintra before leaving Lisbon, so we had a hotel breakfast and then went to the train station to try and catch a train to Sintra. Sintra is only 45 minutes outside of Lisbon and it is a popular tourist destination. There are a few options for how to get there and we just relied… read more

Azores: Sao Miguel West – Continuing on from my blog posts about Portugal, we had a lazy morning in Lisbon and treated ourselves to brunch before starting the second part of our trip. We had ~2 weeks and decided to each pick a location to visit for 1 week. Emily’s choice was the Azores, which is a group of Portuguese islands in the middle of the Atlantic. They seem to be a popular vacation destination among Europeans, but I don’t think the rest of the world… read more

Azores: Sao Miguel East – After two relatively nice days in the Azores (Part I), we got to experience the other side of their Atlantic climate. It was calling for rain on Day 3, and boy did it ever rain! It poured all night and we had a slow start to the morning, waiting for the rain to subside. Eventually we couldn’t wait any longer and we started the drive towards Furnas to try and enjoy the geothermal highlights of the island. Furnas is in the middle of the island, so it’s not too… read more

A Day in Belem – This marks my last post about my Europe Trip! After a week in Morocco, we flew back to Lisbon for 1 more day before returning to Canada. Our flight was delayed, so we didn’t arrive in Lisbon until really late at night and stayed in a hostel right outside Rossi Square. Overall, I felt like we didn’t really have enough time in Lisbon. I would have liked to do a food tour and spend some time exploring the Alfama neighbourhood, but we didn’t have time for everything… read more