bqycc

Hello,

My family and I are travelling to Spain and Portugal by car in early May (April 29th to May 8th), and would love to read your comments on our itinerary and solve our doubts.
My husband and I have been in Spain before, and have done Andalucia and Ruta de los Pueblos Blancos many years ago. My kids have been to Madrid before. We haven´t reached Portugal yet.

Our 10 effective days go like this:

Day 1: Toledo
Day 2: Evora
Day 3 and 4: Lisbon
Day 5: Sintra and Queluz
Day 6: Obeidos, maybe Batalha
Day 7 to 9: We are wondering about travelling to Northern Portugal (Oporto and/or Coimbra) or go to Southern Portugal (maybe Algarve?) or southern Spain (Sevilla, Cordoba, Granada, would love to go to Ronda and others, but we think it will be too Little time, we would love to go to Granada). If we decide to go south, our itinerary would go backwards: day 1, 6, 5 4, 3, 2, …)
Day 10: return to Madrid

Questions:
• What do you think about our itinerary. We would like not to run to take pictures, but enjoy the cities / towns
• Festives: we would be in Lisbon on May 1st ( if we leave the itinerary like that), is there anything we could do there? Maybe enjoy nature? Stroll through some towns? May 5th, we would be either in · Northern or Southern Portugal or Spain. Any recommendations?
· Is there any problem on renting the car in Spain and travel to Portugal?

Thanks for the time to read the post, and I hope you can help us. By the way, my kids are 12 and 15, and love history. … and if you wonder why we are departing from Madrid instead of Lisbon: it is costwise better, and the time difference is very little, maybe 1-2 hours x2 because of the transfere and wait time.

Thanks!
Barbara

IMDonehere

Unless you have friends or family you wish to visit you should consider rejigging this itinerary. It is extremely unrealistic. Why don't you just fly into Lisbon and then decide to go north or south?

bqycc

Because
1) if you add the transfer time to the airport and the time you need to get there for the check-in and the customs part, you need to allocate 4 hours (maybe even more because my husband needs to be in the airport many hours before the check-in time to feel good). It is the time it takes us to get to Evora by car.
2) we like to travel by car and enjoy the scenery while talking, singing and playing
3) the difference in the ticket price for the 4 of us covers more than the rental cost for the 9-10 days

I knew that comment was coming.

Thanks for trying to make our trip easier

kja

I think you are wise to wait to see Andalusia until you can give it more time -- at least a week, or better, 10 days.

I'm not sure you will have enough time to see much of Toledo. Have you confirmed that you'll be able to see anything you want to see there? And with a 7 or 8 hour drive from Toledo to Evora (not counting breaks), I'm not sure you have much time there, either....

You're traveling from Lima? Be sure to give yourself plenty of time to recover from jet lag before trying to drive. (Many people don't realize that driving with jet lag is just as dangerous as driving drunk.)

Good luck!

ribeirasacra

Kids/children may need child seats depending on age and/or height. A search of the forum will give you the answers on what seats are required.
Spanish plated cars have to prepay some tolls on the Portuguese toll roads. Again a search will give you the information.
For the days 7 to 10 it is doubtful if you will keep to your ideal of "We would like not to run to take pictures, but enjoy the cities / towns"

bqycc

After reading your comments (thank you so much for them), we have decided to save this trip to some other time with more days. You all are absolutely right.

kja, so nice to receive your answer! As in previous times, you help me come down to reality from my paradise travel thinking.
I mistakenly thought that Madrid or Toledo Evora was a 4 hour trip. And yes, we didn´t take into account the jet lag effect (we are arriving from Lima).

After reading your comments, I looked for Lima-Lisbon-Lima tickets, and we would have to miss some days to get reasonable rates. So, we are leaving the trip for some other time. Still, I´m happy to research that destination: I´m definitely going there later.

I´ll come back then, because I still don´t know if it would be better to go north or south.

Thanks a lot! Have a great day!!

mnag

If it makes you feel better our group had the same dilemma. Its very difficult to give up either the N or the S. Our decision was to try to do both over 11 days knowing upfront that we will be skimming some of the places we visit.

kja

I'm sure you'll enjoy the trip to Portugal much more when you have time to actually see it.

And I trust you'll find an alternative that you and your family will long remember!