Jonathan, Emily, and Daniel (and one more) to Portugal and Italy: Day Three, Wednesday. The short, hard life of a black cat on the expressway in Portugal.

Daniel slept for 14 and a half hours last night. I think he's still not caught up.

Today we slept in till 11:00. We walked over to a cafe and had some pastries and little cups of super strong coffee. It was funny watching how some Portuguese people would drink it. They'd walk up to the counter, order the coffee, and then stand there watching the lady making it. She would hand it to them, and they'd toss their heads back and gulp it down in one swig, pay the lady and leave.

Daniel isn't too hungry today because he hasn't pooped in a while. Sometimes he was obviously hungry, and then he'd stop eating and say “pooooopoooo” with a sad face. It really ruined his day. He was upset for a lot of the day. We put him to bed a little bit ago, and he really didn't want to go to bed. We finally just let him stand in his crib and cry. After 10 minutes he fell asleep again. Then a while later we checked his diaper, and sure enough... poo!! A pile of hard little rocks. Poor Daniel. We changed him and he didn't wake up. He stirred a little. I have a feeling that was just the plug, and tomorrow we'll be changing a lot of full diapers.

Back to the cafe. After the cafe, we drove to Guimarães (here's how I think it's pronounced-- Gee-ma-rice). It's a really wonderful town. Last year is was Europe's capital of culture. I don't know how important that is, but I thought it was fairytale-ish. You can walk into the old part of town and still see where the old walls surrounding the town are. Inside are tall stone buildings around narrow streets. The buildings are all used by shops, hotels, cafes, and restaurants, and some of the upper floors might be apartments. The streets connect squares with fountains in the middle, and the biggest square has a large church on one side. When the bell rang, Daniel froze and listened with his mouth hanging open. When the melody stopped, he shouted BELL! BELL! and the imitated it for a few minutes “bong bong bong”.

The old town has not one, but two castles on top of a hill inside the walls. One castle is obviously older and very down to business. It only has a couple of windows on the center tower, and the exterior wall and corner towers had no windows. The only way into the center tower was a door 50 feet in the air. I think we were fortunate that the gates to the castle's outer wall were open because I got the feeling they normally are not. There were two men inside with an owl and two hawks on display. They were cleaning things up when we arrived, and interestingly, they put the birds in one of the towers along the wall. So I guess the castle isn't completely uninhabited. The other castle had a lot more windows, but it didn't look like it was made to survive boulders thrown by catapults. It had some neat stone architecture, where sections of the wall would stand out from the rest of the wall to add more space to the top floors. Also, the fireplaces stood out from the walls, and the chimneys were red brick instead of gray stone.

After castling, we let Daniel play on the grass because he was falling to pieces. He wailed for 20 minutes, and we just let him because we'd been fending it off for the last 3 hours. After a while, he calmed down, and then he was happy. He has a little wooden bee with wheels that we got him (after he fell in love with his cousin's of the same kind), and he was joyfully pulling it around on the grass. It makes a fast clicking sound and its wings spin around. Then we started walking down the hill of castles down into the rest of the old town. He walked about half mile pulling his loyal bee. We stopped at a restaurant, and I got bacalhau, which is salted cod cooked in a casserole dish with bacon, mashed potatoes, cheese, and some creamy sauce. It was very good, but Emily said she has had better. I'm glad I got the half portion, because it was massive. Daniel had a ham and cheese omelet (which he ate heartily until his constipation sabotaged his will to eat), and Emily had some beef in a delicious mushroom sauce. Then we walked back to the car, and Daniel pulled his bee the whole way. Maybe 1.5 miles? This is a great thing for us, because previously he didn't want to walk, he didn't want to be in his stroller, he only wanted to be held (hence all of the crying). “But Daniel, you won't poop if don't walk around!”... “NO!”. (That was the extent of most conversations with him today).

He fell asleep on the way home, which was longer than it had to be because we got “lost”. We always knew where we were, but Portuguese roads and freeways are very complicated. Their “freeways” (not free because they have tolls)... interstates (no states in Portugal).... expressways? have very few exits and entrances, which makes it difficult to change directions if you make a mistake on their confusing, tricky onramps. And every time you get off the freeway, you have to pay your toll, and then get another toll paper as you get back on. And most exits do not present a simple way of getting back on the expressway, so you meander around a hundred winding streets and round-a-bouts until you get back to the freeway and hope you pick the right lane on the onramp.

When we got home, he woke up happy, so we sat on the huge porch and ate grapes picked from the vineyard surrounding us (by the owner) and talked about the moon.

“Mooooooon!”

“Yup, there it is.”

“Moooooon!!!”

“Uh huh”

“Wow”

“It is very nice”

“Moooooon!!”

Emily is getting over her cold more and more, but these hard beds make her sore. Daniel's nose still has lots of boogers, but he seems fine otherwise.

Tomorrow we're going to Geres national park.