Notes From A Bear's Journey

     Lisbon is a city not unlike San Francisco or DC, as the hectic yet cosmopolitan feel of visitors and tourists mixes in easily with business workers and local residents (Lisbon also shares a similar latitude as those two US cities).  It is here at Lisbon that the 600-mile-long Tejo river spills into the Atlantic, although more than a few local residents may inwardly harbor thoughts of seeing tourists also flowing out into that ocean.  That push-pull of wanting and yet  not  wanting ever more tourists and elderly expats arriving to their city hides the fact that (as with so many other tourist-dependent cities in the world) nearly 70% of the jobs here in Lisbon are in the service industry (for a few of the Canary Islands, that number can climb to over 80%).  But there is another love-hate clash at work in this part Portugal, and that is one happening right next door in Spain.  As the Rick Steves guidebook wrote: The Portuguese seem humbler and friendlier than the Spanish.  V isitors

      There's still something magical about being at a window seat and watching your plane take off.  That rounding of the corner after a slow taxi out, the feel of the plane straightening itself along the runway, and then that sudden surge of power.  And no matter the size of the plane, I still have to wonder how such a massive chunk of metal and fuel, much less its heavy loads of passengers and their ever-larger pieces of checked luggage, gets off the ground with such ease.  Even when driving in my car, I am baffled that a simple push of my foot somehow causes a mist of gasoline to enter a chamber and ignite flames thst wll then power pistons and valves not much different from the stream trains of old.  How is that it is all so controlled, and controlled in such a manner that most of us can just take all of it for granted, never even considering a simple crack in the line may cause the entire thing to burst into flames as easily as when our Cub scout manhood brains shot lighter f

      TRIP (the noun): The  Oxford dictionary  defines trip as: ... an act of going to a place and returning; a journey or excursion, especially for pleasure.   So that was us, now in  Portugal .  We knew (and still know) next to nothing about the place, other than it being the oldest nation state in all of Europe.  Yes, we knew and had tasted the "fortified" wine called  port , of course (from the city north of Lisbon appropriately named Porto).  And of course we'd read about the country being yet another ex-pat escape for oldies, many of them spreading like a virus as they depart the U.S. for cheaper digs in foreign lands to end their days.  But that wasn't us (yet), since we were only in Lisbon for a day: no extensive  Camino walk , no stunning  Sintra  beaches, no ventures up to the  Basque country  or doing coastal drives inland to enter Barcelona and Spain.  Instead, we were soon leaving the mainland entirely, venturing far out to sea once again, modern-day expl