Hello, again, Blogonauts! So, in case you hadn't picked up on the hints, I'm in Portugal with my 4 traveling buddies. After landing on Wednesday, we settled in for a 3-night stay in our Lisbon AirBnB apartment ... 5 bedrooms, 3.5 baths, across the street from the Italian embassy. It was a great place to launch forth into the city. I plan to post a few additional Lisbon photos in the near future, but for today, I am skipping forward to Saturday, and the visit to Sintra. Sintra lies a few kilometers outside of Lisbon. It marks the location of the Summer Palace built by King Ferdinand II in the 1800s. In the grand tradition of interrelated royal families, King Ferd was cousin to both Prince Albert (husband of Queen Victoria of England) and Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, whose Neuschwanstein Castle served as the model for Cinderella's castle in Disney World. It seems that the gene for whimsical architecture was passed successfully to King Ferd, for his palace is a pastiche of turrets and towers, arches and arcades, ramparts and recesses galore! The original building was once a monastery that King Ferd had repaired. Then he added more on to expand his fantasy. It is almost impossible to know where to look next. One fellow visitor commented that it was like looking at an MC Escher print brought to life. As the tides of history turn, the castle was only occupied by the Royal family for a few decades. Ferdinand's grandson, King Carlos, was (along with the crown prince) assassinated in 1908, and by 1910, the Portuguese people declared the country to be a republic. And thus the royal family was out of a job and evicted from all the palaces. Pena Palace became a museum almost immediately. Luckily, this means that most of the furniture is accurate, which gives Pena a bit more panache than France's nearly-empty Versailles palace. Bob and I spent a couple of hours hiking to the top of the mountain (where the castle sits) and poking through the palaces niches, nooks and crannies. It was a glorious day for photos, so enjoy the pics I have picked and posted. We're off now in our rental car on a jaunt to the northern parts of Portugal. More to come over the next several days! Blog to you later!