We are sad to leave our home and family for the past few days.  I have a sneaky suspicion that it had something to do with the  ludicrously large tip that John gave the porter on arriving day, as he had no change.  Any time we come to reception, we have an army of helpers and when we checked out today we literally had a going away ceremony with everyone coming to say goodbye.  I think that they are amused by the fact that a lady plays golf – not sure why.  But I had 3 people helping me put my clubs in my travel bag, which is fiddly with one helper but 3 + me and we are all tugging at different bits and I had to have a giggle under my breath.  Let’s hope that they were all wanting a tip from John and not thinking that I was useless and couldn’t do it by myself.

It was a leisurely start to the day, requesting a late checkout – no problem. Seriously the staff couldn’t have been nicer, I highly recommend that if you need to stay in Dubai do stay here.  Breakfast and a slow pack, FaceTime with various family members and then off to the airport, which is where I am writing this.

The Dubai International terminal is pretty impressive, even flying economy we didn’t have to wait too long to check in, got an emergency exit. Got access to the lounge, all is good.

My observations of Dubai.

• 10 times larger than I thought it would be, look at UAE on the map – no way would you think that you would have to travel 30 mins to most places.
• the road network looks like it would serve Los Angeles well.
• The taxis are government run and cheap, especially compared to Sydney.  They have pink roofed taxis which are female drivers for female only passengers.
• Not sure where the Emiratis are, we didn’t see many.
• their oil reserves are depleting, so they have the foresight to create something out of nothing, now their man in revenue is from tourism and aviation.
• 40°C in the desert is really hot.
• apart from the construction dust, it is clean.  The underneath of the road bypasses are white and in pristine condition.
• the royals must play golf because you are treated like a royal when you do.
• Even the mosquitos couldn’t be arsed to come out as its too hot for them.

So long Dubai, see you in 2 weeks.

Talk about flying over troubled waters, you have a live camera on board so you can see the view the pilot has and the tracking over Iran, Syria, Iraq – had my fingers crossed on the flight.  But I am sitting here with the sun rising in our beautiful hotel room.  We arrived safe and sound and had a pretty uneventful flight other than the 2 chinese children that were playing football with the backs of our chairs!  Don’t you just hate that…

Lisbon airport was a shock after Dubai’s pristine white voluminous halls.  We got the luggage with no issues and off to find the rental car, the place was packed and I lost John.  I also realised how much I need to wear my glasses because several people looked like John!!  He came back to find me like a lost little lamb…  Then we located the rental car hub and breathed a sigh of relieve that we didn’t rent a car from Enterprise as their queue had about 50 people in it.  Then we went to our short queue at SIXT rental and thinking this was a good move – the shortest queue.  What we didn’t factor in is the speed of the process, Enterprise obviously were! SixT were not..  I mean seriously how long does it take to get a car that you have already pre-filled out the information for.  I went and bought some water and a Starbucks coffee came back and it hadn’t moved.  I was seriously impressed with Johns patience, he had been kicked about by a chinese girl for the past 8 hours and now tired and waiting for what was obviously a bad system at SixT.  We were eventually out of there at 10:30 after landing at 7:48.  #missingdubai

Little did we know that the excitement wasn’t over.  Tired, but not jet lagged, driving a BMW (we drive Japanese – so when you mean to indicate the windscreen wipers go on), its dark and we need to find our hotel in old town Lisbon, which is charming because of its narrow, cobbled stone, windy, hilly, did I say really narrow streets which seem to be shared by pedestrians!  Cant turn the windscreen wipers off, I am trying to navigate and see in the dark to turn the wipers off, we now have the front and back wipers going! John is really good at adapting to driving on the wrong side, but he was really favouring the right side of the road, getting very close to walls and cars and i had a front row seat for this closeness.  I was getting cramp in my foot as I felt that I was sitting in the drivers seat so I needed to control the brake pedals!  We found a police car which luckily for us we used as a guide and he drove most of the way to the hotel.  We were using Google maps (thank you) and when we were supposed to turn right into the hotel there was a large construction site.  Now what to do, just drive and the navigator should reset itself – so we turned right when we could (we couldn’t turn left as the Rio Toja was there).  Now we are in the heart of old town, were there are no rules you just drive and the one with the biggest cojones or maiores cojones won.  My foot is still cramping as I have way more braking to do, I am back seat driving – reminding John to drive on the right hand side, go left then go right – mind those people.  Stop at the traffic light, oops stop in the middle of the traffic lights.  Oh no turned too soon so we are going further away from our hotel which was 3 mins away and is now 10 mins away, so back around we go.  More braking to do, John’s cojones are large by now – he is pushing in and owning the place, I am an expert back seat driver – reminding John to drive on the right, go left then go right – mind those people, go into the middle you are going to hit that car.  Eventually we found the little cul de sac that the hotel was in.  They offer a parking service – hell yeah, don’t care how much it costs take the car!

The hotel is an old bakery and is what I would describe as a boutique hotel, only 44 rooms but a beautiful view over the river and old town, and cathedrals.  So we sat on the terrace bar and drank a bottle of red and thanked our lucky stars that we had arrived in this beautiful place. Oh and it is only 22°c, positively cool!

View from our room

Old town and cathedral at night

Categories: The Masters Trip

Shaz Thompson

Mad about golf, enthusiastic about life, totally in love with my husband and just having fun.