Lisbon-Boston-Woodbury

Sunday, January 14, 2024

The guidelines always say to be at the airport three hours before an international flight, so I thought if we were there almost two hours early, it would be good. We had a nice hotel breakfast 45 minutes before it was supposed to be set up and called an Uber. It cost about 1/4 of what it cost to get picked up by the airport shuttler on the way in. We stood out in front of our hotel and I thought to take a picture of it. That brown door is our hotel.

We zoomed through security in 20 minutes, even though the line looked daunting. We checked our ticket and it said, NO, no meals served. What? On a 6 hour flight? We left at 9:15 local time and landed at 11:45 local time, so officially I guess we didn’t miss a meal time. We stopped and bought ham and cheese baugettes (yesterday’s were supposed to be airplane emergency food, but they ended up dinner) and a can of Coke Zero. Coke Zero is everywhere in Portugal – I haven’t even seen any diet Coke. I am interested in that, as a Coke Zero drinker. Also, I have not (even in grocery stores) (they were small grocery stores) seen any other no calorie soda.

Anyway, we dilly-dallied our way along in the airport, then finally headed toward our gate – and ran into passport control. How dumb do you have to be to forget that you need to have your passport checked? Us dumb, apparently. Again, a daunting line and we were done in 20 minutes.

Our plane had lots of empty and the people in the center section had three or four seats to stretch out on. We were fine sitting on the side, watching movies, but that stretching out looked pretty great. We watched Gran Tourismo, The Persian Version, and Scrapper. All were good and it felt really fun to watch and watch. We started Abominable – 30 minutes in – and were very happy it was on the next plane to finish it.

When we got off in Boston, we had no wait at customs (I had eaten my ham sammich, but I declared Keith’s remaining half) (we did not have to eat it on the spot like I thought we would. I still have it) and followed the signs to connecting gates/EXIT. There was one connecting gates sign and 42,000 EXIT signs. I commented that that was weird, because obviously they weren’t going to make us leave the terminal to go back through security in the domestic terminal.

Or not obviously. We walked and walked and walked and walked just to get to customs, then walked 15 minutes more to get to the domestic terminal. Remember us feeling like eastern Europe waiting for our bus on the way through here last week? Well, the answer to that 10-minute bus ride going the other way is to walk. Huh. At least we were not outside. We decided that we missed a sign somewhere and that we were supposed to grab a bus from international to domestic, so I asked the TSA lady. She said of course we couldn’t get off a plane from Portugal and just get on a plane to Minneapolis. We asked what would happen if we had purchased something liquid at duty free – she said it was possible, but highly unlikely, that they would let it through, if it was packed appropriately by duty free. I have never had any duty free packing beyond a bag, so…that would have made me really mad.

We had to wait to get de-iced (ice, ew) and then wait to get a gate, but we finally made it home. Keith got us McDonald’s and it was delicious. We watched the end of Monarch – even though the Apple TV app tried to frustrate us to death by having the sound go on for 3 seconds, then off for 3 seconds. It’s 4am in Portugal, so I think we should go to sleep. Keith is practicing – I don’t think it will keep me awake for a minute.