DAY 11 - LISBON TO TORONTO
Last day in Portugal. Nothing to do but get to my flight. Last possibility to ‘go explore Lisbon’ before I need to be at the airport, but who am I kidding?
The day begins with the real reason I chose to come back to this hotel: buffet breakfast.
On the elevator down I meet an older woman with vibrant blue and pink hair who turns out to be getting the morning flight to Toronto that day. She lives in Muskoka, and misses the city. When we arrive at the lobby her husband clarifies for her: no, they adamantly do not miss the city.
I milk the buffet for all it’s worth, camping at a table and probably eating way too much as I watch the ebb and flow of other hotel guests filter in and out.
Finally I cross some invisible threshold of embarrassment and retreat back up to my room where I spend the next couple of hours killing time until I absolutely must check out. Shower, pace, brush teeth, pace, unpack and lay out contents of backpack on bed, pace, repack more efficiently, stare at backpack, unpack again, repack even more efficiently, none of this matters, eventually just flop on the bed and watch the planes. This time my room is on the other side of the hotel, so I get to see them appearing on the horizon and closing in as opposed to their final descent.
At 11:59:59am I hoist my bag and depart. The subway would be so easy, and now I know how to use it, but with the time before my flight I decide to walk back. An hour on my feet will probably be good for me on the 7 hour flight.
I take the same route in reverse, this time much more confident in navigating the area around the airport and, as is my wont, I arrive there ridiculously early. Right on schedule.
Security is a breeze so I have more than ample time to stroll the airport. It’s surprisingly busy in there (I don’t know why surprising) and there’s no convenient seating nook for me to hole up in for hours so I wander - through the food court, past a garish sardine outlet…
…into a kitchen-sink-style souvenir place where… they do not have the little whatsits I had my eye on at Sao Vicente. Lesson learned. I scour the place for the closest approximations and cut my losses.
For the next couple of hours I bide my time hopping from cafe to cafe, buying something paltry to justify using their nice chairs and tables. I explore the extremities of the airport and find all the tucked away charging stations and kiosks. I catch up on podcasts, getting the backwash of the presidential election direct into my ears, ad nauseum.
Finally, it’s a reasonable time to actually get to my gate. I head over there to find an additional, unexpected passport screening checkpoint no one told me about. For me, this is fine, because I always leave oceans of time at airports. Not so for the British group behind me who clearly left things late to show up for boarding and also had no idea this was a thing. The line moves quick but the whole winding way through the stanchions they’re griping about this inhumane and backwards airport design.
The man who finally checks my passport at last closes the loop from the start of the trip with the fourteen-year-old cherub. He’s six-foot-five, broad chested… a chiseled robot. For all that, he is perfectly pleasant and waves me through effortlessly.
They check our passports one last time at the gate and put us behind more stanchions. I was hoping for a bathroom before boarding but we’ve been corralled. And boarding is torture. We’re standing in line for 10 minutes, and then an additional (I swear) 20 on the jetway with no idea what could be taking so long on the other end.
Finally on board I wind up with an aisle seat with a very nice woman at the window and between us, an old crone who reacts to anything happening around her with open-mouthed horror, ie. ‘would you like something to drink?’ or ‘chicken or pasta?’ She stares in mute terror at the flight attendant, then snaps her head back and forth between me and the woman at the window hoping we can help. We do. We take turns. But it becomes trying by the end of the flight. In the middle, she tries to get her screen to work by slapping it over and over with her full palm and asking why the volume isn’t turning up. I concentrate very hard on my crossword.
She also hauls out some rosary beads and beat-up prayer books and flips through for some choice recitations (silently mouthing, at least). Time was I’d think this was endearing and sweet but that tolerance has apparently drained out of me. Instead, I really want to propose to her that she pray to God for a safe flight, I pray to Satan to crash the plane, and we see who wins.
But I don’t. Instead, I mainline Mission Impossible: Fallout, The Founder and Ocean’s Eleven, and we land in Toronto without a convenient epilogue. Satan does not crash the plane.