Lisbon to Estoril

The real reason for my trip was to attend a conference for work with Jill.  This conference was being held in Estoril, a “suburb” of Lisbon from July 27-Aug 1.  So today, we had to make our way out to Estoril for the welcome reception.

We took the train from Cais do SodrĂ© station (1.70 Euros I believe) to Estoril.  Our hotel was about 4 blocks from the station, uphill (seriously, could there be more hills in Portugal?).  We arrived, but were unable to check into our hotel yet, so we left our bags and walked around a bit.  We had asked for a suggestion of somewhere to have lunch, but the desk agent told us there were only a few places and they were a few blocks away.  We decided to just have a look around ourselves (after all, it was a beach town…it had to have restaurants), and found to our disbelief that there was an Italian restaurant right next door.  We arrived back at the hotel after 3pm (the normal check-in time) and were told we would have to wait as our room still wasn’t ready.  I think they took pity on us (or were concerned we would be like the other American group ahead of us in line who began to yell upon being told their room wasn’t ready), because another desk agent then changed us to another room that was ready.