I left the Arctic Circle a little after seven in the morning, and by four in the afternoon I would be standing on cobblestones in a country that had not dipped below sixty degrees the entire time I had been away from it. Nine hours, north to south, and almost none of it felt like travel so much as waiting.
The airport express ticket was still worthless two days later, so it was another Uber to reach Rovaniemi's tiny airport, small enough that security took less time than the ride there had. The flight to Helsinki was short and comfortable, the kind of flight you get for free once you have flown far enough north that nobody bothers competing on price. Two hours to wait for the connection, most of it spent in front of a burrito that had no business tasting as good as it did in an airport terminal.
The flight to Lisbon left at one and took the better part of five hours, long enough to watch the ground under the window slowly stop looking like Finland and start looking like nowhere in particular, cloud the whole way. We landed at four, two time zones and one entire climate away from where the morning had started.
A metro ride brought me to Rossio, and the hostel was hiding in plain sight above it. Destination Hostel sits on the second floor of Rossio train station itself, a glass roofed common room and a small indoor garden tucked into a building most people only pass through to catch a train. I had braced for trains under my pillow all night; whatever they did to soundproof the rooms actually worked, and the loudest thing about sleeping directly above a working station turned out to be nothing at all. Rossio Square was less than a minute away on foot, Restauradores a few minutes one direction, the Gloria funicular up to Bairro Alto a few minutes the other. Outside the station door, the square turned out to be exactly what the photographs had promised: black and white cobblestones laid in a wave pattern that makes the ground itself look like it is moving, cafe terraces ringing the edges, the grid of Baixa's streets running off in every direction below it.
My first job in Lisbon was deciding what to do with the next one. Pena Palace had been the plan for months, right up until it wasn't: too touristic, exactly the kind of place I generally build my trips around avoiding. I went looking for an alternative and found a via ferrata circuit in Arrabida Natural Park instead, run by a company called WIND that has apparently been doing this for thirty years. I had never done a via ferrata in my life.
I had been planning around Pena Palace for months, and gave it up in the time it took to type "via ferrata" into a search bar.
I coordinated the whole booking over WhatsApp, which felt like an unusually casual way to arrange something involving cliffs and a harness, and settled on a pickup the next morning. Without a driving license, and with no real way in or out of the park by public transport, I paid extra to have them collect me from the city and drop me back after. Pickup was set for nine.
