Lisbon: Donkey Boys, Robbery and the Hotel of Hard Beds

" I hope you have a better trip than I did" said the stout gray-haired lady I encountered in the computer room of the palace where we were staying. In the spring of 2004, John and I traveled to Lisbon, Portugal. We were armed with a Rick Steves guidebook, a money belt and 6 weeks of conversational Portuguese. Whenever we became unhappy with our hotel, we'd rush to the nearest internet café, log on to Tripadvisor.com and book a new hotel. We'd pack up our luggage and whisk off in a taxi to the newer and better accommodations.

Our latest hotel, though the beds were hard, was a palace. Yes, after one night in The Hard Bed Plaza Hotel, we arose early, fortified ourselves with several espressos and went straight to the nearest internet café where we booked several nights in this palace, which was usually expensive, but apparently heavily discounted in the off season. Here you could wander endlessly through the hallways or walk through carpeted rooms decorated with gilt-framed antique paintings, and see no other humans save an occasional person dusting the chandeliers. It was in the palace that I met the lady from Iowa who'd fallen out of a taxi. We were in the habit of keeping in touch with our kids (and John's work) through e-mail. This hotel's elegant leather bound in-room information book, besides featuring room-service menus in an elaborate curlicued script, claimed there was "internet" access on the third floor. You could only get to the third floor by wandering the many elegant hallways and with dumb luck sometimes finding the right elevator. No one was ever on the third floor, though there were rooms and rooms of paintings, except for the day I met the lady from Iowa. "Internet access" turned out to be one computer and on this particular day, the computer was occupied by a woman who began a rambling monologue. It seemed that hotel employees (or gremlins) had spent the night dragging furniture and moving it around right above her room. Also her slick, wrinkle-free Travelfree skirt had caused her to get stuck and she "fell out of a taxi" although she had not had a lot to drink.