Dinner our first night with our friend Luba, whom we first met on a bike trip in Japan. Since then we’ve seen her on an earlier trip to London as well as Norway, Greece, & Uzbekistan. Can’t wait to figure out what country (or continent!) is next.

And so we’re off on a nine-week saunter around England, Scotland, and Wales. Fully 26 two- and three-night stops – and London is the only one of them I’ve ever been to. (Mark’s been to a few, but certainly not most of them…) Basically we’ve just never given Great Britain its due, in no small part because we’re not that excited by British food, but there’s so much of our history embedded here it’s time to dig deep. And we enjoyed last year’s trip through France so much that we figured repeating it (albeit without the French food) had to be good.

First stop, easiest to fly into, is London. What’s odd is how little I know my way around the city but I’m starting to solve that. We were here just this last February and it’s really starting to grow on me. That’s in part because I really liked where we stayed – not just the hotel (Claridge’s, one of the city’s grand dame hotels), but right in the middle of Mayfair, a really beautiful neighborhood (neighbourhood??). Obviously, the city has it all: beautiful parks, good restaurants, great museums, and really good theater, and with all the bustle a New Yorker would expect.

Despite the heat, Day One included a walk through Regent’s Park

Queen Mary’s Rose Garden in Regent’s Park

Speaking of restaurants, one of our favorites in Greenwich Village is a place called Dante – great food and some of the best cocktails in Manhattan. Just a couple weeks ago Mark got a marketing email from Dante announcing that for the month of July only they were going to take over the kitchen and bar at Claridge’s – the very hotel where we already had a reservation. So our first night we had dinner with our old friend Luba at a place that felt more than a little like home.

One of the attractions for spending all of July and August is that the weather should be way cooler than in Manhattan, but you wouldn’t have known that the day we arrived. We fly in and by the time we get to the hotel the temperature is in the upper-80s, heading up to the low-90s by mid-afternoon. Just brutally hot for being a tourist. The good news is that the weather started to moderate by late afternoon and the second day was mostly cool and slightly rainy. Day three though was perfect, mostly sunny and low 70s. We’re hoping for a lot of that over the next two months.

Mark above the Thames, with some of the London landmarks in the background. This was classic sweater weather, though it was hard to believe just the day before had been brutally hot.

We spent a bit of time in parks and had a nice morning in the Tate Modern, an art museum opened 25 years ago by our friend Lars. The highlight though was three shows in just two days. First up was This Bitter Earth, a two-man show directed by Billy Porter, a Broadway legend who we briefly met here last February. If the West End is the equivalent of Broadway, this was essentially off-Broadway. It wouldn’t have been on our radar except that friends from New York are producers on the show. A good show, it’s easy to see it coming to New York though probably too “small” a show for Broadway. But a nice introduction to off-West End theater.

Omari Douglas and Alexander Lincoln, stars of This Bitter Earth, take their curtain call

The next day we had tickets to a matinee performance of a new production of Evita. Now that was amazing – a huge, star-studded performance where you just sit in awe of the performances, production, music, choreography and all that. Especially the choreography. You can be certain that show will come to Broadway. And then that night we went to a new musical, For One Night Only, a “jukebox” musical about the production of Live Aid, the massive concert to raise money for the Ethiopian famine 40 years ago. The music was good, sometimes great, and the story was … OK. But you can forgive a lot if you have fun ’80s music.

Now it’s off to new experiences around the country. We head southeast to Canterbury to start before working our way counterclockwise up into Scotland, then back down through Wales and ultimately down to Cornwall in the far southwest. Should be a great nine weeks!

Sometimes I’m just a shameless tourist

Lunch at Hispania, what turned out to be a great tapas restaurant

The cast of Evita, including Rachel Zegler as Evita and Diego Andres Rodriguez (who by my sense stole the show) on the left as Che

Some of the cast from For One Day Only

I think we’ve taken this picture before but I still love it

This painting by Joan Snyder was in the Tate Modern. It was particularly noteworthy for us since we have one of her later works in our gallery.

A Tower of Babel installation at the Tate Modern made up of old radios

Mount Street Garden, where we spent a most pleasant interlude reading

The Italian bartender at Claridge’s made great Perfect Manhattans

A controversial highlight from Evita was that the lead comes out to this balcony every performance to sing the show’s biggest number – Don’t Cry for Me Argentina – to a crowd that gathers. On the one hand, those of us who pay for the show see a live video of her performance while tourists walking by see it live. On the other hand, the song is about Evita singing to her adoring fans from the balcony of the presidential mansion in Buenos Aires, so Mark & I both totally approved.

And finally, Rachel Zegler taking her final bows

Mark in Lisbon’s Cathedral

And finally our last stop on this Portugal Explorer was Lisbon, the capital and largest city. There is a lot to like about Lisbon – some great food, a top-notch boutique hotel, beautiful architecture, important history – but somehow it didn’t grab me as much as most European capitals do, or even as much as Porto did on the start of this trip.

Perhaps it’s just that we got off on a bad start. We returned our rental car on arriving in Lisbon and it was just an awful experience. Filling the gas tank on the outskirts of the city was ridiculously challenging – it probably took 15 or even 20 minutes, just extreme inefficiency. And then we were supposed to return it to a Europcar location in the city and when we go to the address there was absolutely no sign of a car return. We drove around a couple times but nothing. We tried to call the help number the agency gave us when we picked the car up and repeatedly just got a recording (in Portuguese so we had no idea what they were saying). Eventually we decided to try a ramp to … something underground … and sure enough, there it was. A sign outside would have helped.

The Palácio Principe Real, our glorious hotel for three nights

From there things got better. Our hotel was an 18th century palace that had stood empty for some 15 years before the owners, Gail & Miles, started restoring it and turning it into a hotel. It’s almost hard to believe that this the first (and last, they assure us) hotel they’ve ever done. It’s as though they had traveled the world, found all the little niggling mistakes that other hotels make, and corrected them all. The grounds were beautiful with a heated pool and very pleasant places to read and relax, and breakfasts were great.

There were some nice neighborhoods to wander around in but surprisingly there weren’t any great museums or cathedrals that you just had to see. One of the highlights of the city is the area called Belém, much of which was built out when Portugal was a rising imperial power so it has all that massive architecture displaying the now-spent glory that was once Portugal. Mark and I went down to look around but ultimately we didn’t actually do much.

Mark in front of the Monument of Discoveries in Belém, celebrating Portugal’s role in the 15th and 16th centuries Age of Discovery. When we got to it I realized the monument is literally the only thing that I remembered from my one visit to Lisbon 20-plus years ago.

The other highlight for us was that our NY friend David – last seen a few days ago at the wedding – came to Lisbon while we were there and stayed at our little boutique hotel. We have somewhat different schedules – he would be finishing breakfast as we were getting ready to go to lunch – but it was fun going to dinner with him and just spending way more time than we normally would in New York. But then it was Saturday morning and time to go to the airport – our little trip through Portugal was great fun, but now it was over.

The view of our courtyard from our hotel room. And while I didn’t get any great pictures of our friend David, that’s actually him sitting on one of the chairs at the pool talking to Mark.

Lunch at a great tapas restaurant on our last day

In keeping with our experiences in both Porto and Coimbra, Lisbon was pretty hilly with a lot of steps. I learned during this trip that the kene tendonitis I suffered with for well over a year was really, truly gone – if all this elevation didn’t cause it to flare up nothing will.

The former Jerónimos Monastery in Belém dating from the early 16th century. It was built near the site of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage linking Europe to Asia via the ocean. It now houses his remains along with those of several former Portuguese kings.

Mark in front of the Belém Tower, a 16th century fortification that marked the embarkation point for Portuguese world explorers

The Cathedral

Inside the Cathedral

Just a cool Lisbon street. We found Lisbon somewhat grittier than most Western European cities we’ve visited. It had an aura of faded glory that was beautiful at times and a little sad at other times.

Lunch on arrival at our beautiful hotel

And breakfast

While the port of Lisbon remains an enormous work area – really cutting off the city from the mouth of the Tagus River – this area for sailboats was prettier

Beautiful and tasty sirloin at a cool Indian tapas place called Gunpowder

Mark at lunch savoring some octopus in front of him and a really great bottle of Portuguese wine

And random bears inside a random doorway

The spectacular coastline just a short walk out of Lagos

After the wedding we did a 3-1/2 hour drive down to the Algarve, the region of Portugal that runs along the Southern Atlantic coast. The Algarve is Portugal’s beach playground, with a series of resort towns, of all different characters, dotting the whole coast.

We chose the town of Lagos, close to the western edge of the Algarve. Lagos (the “s” at the end is pronounced like “sh.”) is known as something of a bustling British summer vacation enclave. Because we are here pre-season, we will not enjoy a proper beach experience, but then we will miss out on the partying Brit crowds as well. A reasonable trade-off.

The highlight of the area is a coastline just outside the town that is lined with gorgeous coves and rock formations. A wonderful hiking route leads you to viewpoint after stunning viewpoint. And it was nice to enjoy these trails without the crowds that must be coming as the weather warms up. Jim went a step further, spending a fair amount of time on one of the beaches and enjoying a swim way too frigid for my taste.

This was a nice, low-key stop for a few days, especially after the fun chaos of the wedding. The weather was intermittent, but offered a good dose of sunshine for exploring this stunning coastline.

We love flaming chorizo!

After that wonderful lunch of tapas and flaming chorizo, a rainstorm suddenly came out of nowhere. You can’t tell from this picture that it’s pouring rain behind me, forcing us to stay and have a glass of wine to wait it out.

More Algarve coastline

Our hotel, just inside the old city walls, offered a lovely pool and huge internal gardens, where they grow lots of fresh ingredients for the restaurant

A church in a pretty town square

Jim does a selfie on the hiking trail

In Indian restaurants they think it’s weird when we don’t order rice or bread. But the pretty colors make up for what’s missing in texture.

Elegant homefronts in this low-rise town

Loving the gorgeous hiking

One night at dinner we overheard people at another table talking about “the wedding.” Later someone mentioned “Accenture,” the company where Hajir works. So we had to ask, and indeed we enjoyed meeting Neha and Payton, whom we hadn’t manage to meet at the wedding itself.

Jim takes a “refreshing” swim

One more look at this coastline