November 6,
2018 Batalha Monastery Prince
Henry the Navigator Sunday Nov 4th
The fourth
post of the day. I have put the photos
for each of the four places we visited in separate albums.
Sunday
morning we picked our Europcar rent-a-car at about 9:30 without any
trouble. The GPS was another
matter. I had the agent set the system
to allow tollways, I rented the device that let us use the high speed toll
lanes. Well it quickly became clear that
we were not taking the tollway, after we got that fixed the drive to Batalha
Monastery went smoothly. I wanted to
visit Prince Henry the Navigator’s tomb because I remember reading about him in
grade school. Sue is sweet enough to put
up with my eccentricities. We arrived in
Batalha around 11:00, and we saw the spires of the Monastery. We were surprised at how large the Monastery
is. I mean it is huge. There are separate albums for each site we
visited, and I haven’t put many comments.
Our next
visit was to the Shrine of Fatima. From
the internet I knew the main building was pretty big. The entire site is almost too big to
describe. From the parking area there
was a very large round building that we think maybe used for Mass during times
of large pilgrimages. There is a vast
open space between the round building and the shrine. When we arrived there was a Mass going on in
the Plaza. There were supplicants
crawling toward the Mass area on their hands and knees. Basically three children, two girls and a boy
saw the Virgin Mary in 1917. This is a
huge pilgrimage site, we visited in the off season.
The third
site I found by accident on Trip Advisor.
I saw a post about a National Park that has fossilized dinosaur tracks
that is only about 10 km from Fatima. We
had to see them. The tracks were made by
Sauropods about 175 MILLION years ago!
By the time we arrived at the park the weather had turned pretty
bad. It was windy, rainy and cold. Only the two park employees were there when
we arrived. You’ll see from the photos
how bad the weather actually was. The
path to the tracks was uphill most of the way and it was 1.8 km long. You can see how Sue humors me. I have added a link to the Parks English web
page, if you are interested. One other
note, I think Our Lady of Fatima was looking out for us, because the mist/fog
lifted when we were trying to figure out how to get back to the parking
lot. The little map we had from the park
split into several paths, and we were not sure which way to go. Then the weather cleared and we saw that we
were close to the main building. We were
soaked by the time we got back to the car.
Our umbrellas were just about destroyed, and Sue was soaked. I was a bit better because my jacket was
waterproof, both of our pants were soaked.
But we saw 175 MILLION year old dinosaur tracks, it was worth it.
Our next
stop was to visit the Convento Christo in Tomar. This was a Templar Castle that was converted
into a convent. By this time Sue had
seen enough, so I went in on my own.
There was no guide or map in English.
This was another large place. I
took a lot of photos. I haven’t added
any comments because I’m out of gas. I
left the car running to keep Sue warm, but it must have an automatic feature
because it shut off shortly after I left.
Sue was freezing by the time I got back to the car. If you want more information see Google. Our drive back to Lisbon was slow because of
the rain and accidents on the tollway, so for much of the drive we were
crawling in first/second gear. We made
it safely. I dropped Sue at the hotel
and the GPS had me driving around a bit before I got back to the rental car
agency.
I have
photos from two more days, but I won’t get to post them until we get home.
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