Ali- When Maya was 3 years old, I had a conference in Lisbon, Portugal and the whole family trucked over to see the sights. Maya was going through a phase where, for various reasons, she had decided walking was not her thing, and so we spent a fair amount of that trip hauling a 40 pound kid around on our backs. I would also like to note that Lisbon is damn hilly and by the end of our stay we were self medicating with Ginja, the Portuguese sour cherry liquor sold out of shacks as a digestive and all purpose pain killer.
Flash forward 7 years and the same conference was back in Lisbon. With visiting family obligations, Joe and Maya couldn’t arrive until Saturday afternoon and we all had to be back Monday giving us roughly 26 hours to revisit the city, unburdened as it were compared to the last time.
Now before heading to Lisbon I had a colleague at University of Zurich show me pictures of this ridiculous looking Disney castle on a hill in some town outside Lisbon called Sintra. So it seemed like this was the thing to see given that we had previously seen many of the Lisbon sights.
Ok so first let me mention that this conference is a bit unusual in that it brings out the unknown wild side of statisticians, and this was the Friday night conference dinner scene (those are actual professional statisticians playing instruments), which greatly increased my risk of self-ass-making during my Saturday morning talk. 
Saturday morning comes and I give my talk at the conference, managing to sound tollerably competent (total coup!). Then I headed into the city center to check into our Airbnb and wait for Joe and Maya. Tiff, the very nice Australian massage therapist who owned the place, was kind enough to say I wasn’t completely nuts to try to head out to Sintra that afternoon. She gave the key tip to take an Uber there rather than haul out by train.
Joe and Maya finally stumble in around 2:30 pm and by 3pm we are on the road, tucked into our Uber. An hour later, the Uber driver drops us off at the castle front door, saving us the uphill schlepp from the train station for the ridiculously reasonable price of 30 Euros. 
The Pena Palace is actually only one of the castles that sit majestically in the Sintra Mountains but it’s the only one to make the 7 wonders of Portugal list, which shockingly doesn’t include the Ginja shacks. The castle owes its marvelousness to king consort Ferdinand II, who got tired of just sitting around looking pretty as consort to Queen Maria II, and decided to take on a castle as a hobby. 
He hired a mining engineer/landscaper/amateur architect named Baron Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege to design the place. Right now you may be puzzling over the choice of a mining engineer but the whole bloody castle is fused into the mountain making it clear that someone who knows how to burrow into rock was essential. 
After getting our fill of the castle, we decided to hike back down to Sintra to catch another Uber back to Lisbon and experienced the wonders of the surrounding grounds along the way. You could spend about a week just wandering the hills that are part of the estate. 
Back in Lisbon on Sunday morning we had three hours to eat famous Portuguese pastries, tour St George’s castle and acquire several bottles of Port before heading to the airport. However, the proprietor of Pasteleria Saga was very firm that Patel de nata can only be eaten after a proper breakfast. So we ate a Portuguese version of croissant instead and promised to return to grab a box before our flight.
Next we marched over to St. George’s castle, which is indeed dedicated to the popular warrior Saint who somehow found the time to terrorized dragons while being martyred for his Christian faith. 
The same peacocks were there that Maya terrorized in tribute to Saint George 7 years ago. 
Lastly we hightailed it over across town to the only open booze shop to get Port and Ginja to take back to Zurich. A week later I can report that one large bottle of Ginja is not nearly enough; bring an extra suitcase. 
