Three Days in Lisbon, Portugal (with a toddler)

If you are just checking in, we spent a week in Portugal and split up our time between 3ish days in the Algarve and 3ish days in Lisbon. On Friday morning, we checked out of our AirBnb in the Algarve and made the drive back north to Portugal's capital of Lisbon. We had three(ish) days to explore the city before flying out of Portugal to spend a week in the Azores. After a few days on the southern coast, we were excited to be in the city within walking distance to just about everything. We stayed at an AirBnb north of Alfama and Bairro Alto which was walking distance to a great park and a lot of restaurants and a great bakery.

Here is how we spent our three days exploring the city (and Sintra). 

Three Days in the Algarve (with a toddler)

Welcome to the first (of several) posts in my Portugal series. To recap, we took off two weeks in mid-June for a European summer holiday. We spent one week on the mainland of Portugal, and one week on the Portuguese island of Sao Miguel in the Azores (roughly 1,000 miles from the Portuguese mainland).  Why Portugal? My parents were born in the Azores and find themselves traveling back to Portugal and the Azores time and time again. It's also a safe and affordable place to travel. I planned this two-week trip abroad with my husband, our 16-month-old son, my parents, and my inlaws. It was our first serious trip with our son and his first time on a plane so we planned our travels when the adult-to-child ratio was in our favor. 

The streets of Ferragudo

This was my second time back to Portugal, but my first time as an adult and my first time with a toddler old in tow. You may be wondering why we chose to drag a toddler on a red-eye flight and all this way when he is too young to ever remember any of it. The truth is I wanted the memories here with him and the confidence to travel with him. I wanted him to learn to be a baby who travels and to be able to adapt to a different culture, different food, and a different way of life. I wanted to raise a child who had been abroad before he had been to Disney and from a young age, could see the world through a lens that wasn't always clouded with our American Exceptionalism. 

It's not that I mean to sound pretentious and if you break it down dollar for dollar, a European vacation is likely cheaper than a week at the parks after you factor in overpriced meals, expensive lodging, and the high cost of park admission. It's that I don't enjoy crowds, the culture at the parks, and Disney World just has little appeal to the way I like to travel. Now more than ever, it's important to expose our children and ourselves to different cultures and experiences. I'll take him once when he's older for his American right of passage but for now, I wanted to experience a family summer vacation the way Europeans do.