As you can tell by the title, Xenia and I are in Portugal for a couple of days. To be exact: for 5,5 days. Originally, we were supposed to stay in Lisboa for two days, before continuing our little Portugal trip to the Algarve close to Aljezur. The main reason of our little Portugal vacation was an invitation by the brand Brunotti to join them for a Stan Up Paddling and bootcamp weekend. Why I marked the word ‘supposed to’ fat? Well, you know Xenia and me.. I’m gonna tell you the full story now!
In case you’ve been watching X and my L.A. snaps or my German follow me around videos, you might already have an idea of our super fun, yet extremely chaotic and spontaneous life. If you think I’m chaotic and not the best organization talent – guess what: me AND Xenai = pure chaos 🙂 But hey, life would be boring if it always went according to the plan, right 😉
Lets start from the beginning though. In January, I was contacted by the brand Brunotti, if I wanted to join them and a couple of Dutch and Belgium bloggers to a fun active SUP retreat somewhere in Portugal. Since I’ve never been in Portugal before my immediate answer was YES! New travel destinations and active trips always get me! Since my travel buddies Jay and Lina didn’t have time, I asked my favorite chaotic partner in crime: Xenia.
March came, but a plan where we would go, or where we should stay in Libsoa, was (obviosuly!) still lacking. X and I are very easy going when it comes to traveling: Why organize and plan everything weeks ahead, when deep down you already know, plans won’t help anyway 😉 I’m sure, for some of you this might sound scary and not understandable, but for us it’s our daily life. I stopped planning my life about two years ago, when I moved to L.A. Because you never know how things turn out and I learned to adapt to new situations quick and live in the moment, rather than wasting my time by planning out week and months ahead. I’m happy, if I can plan my next day 😉 Good (or bad) thing: X and I are the same when it comes to planning and our motto is: somehow it always works out 😉
The ‘problem’ with this motto is: it works! You have no idea, how many chaotic mistakes we’ve already made together, but in the end they always seemed to work in favour for us. Plus, you know my over-all life motto is ‘Everything Happens For A Reason’ (short: EHFAR). If you’re spontaneous, open for new adventures, easy going and positive – life will work wonders for you.
Back to the story though: Xenia and I didn’t even have a hotel for Lisboa until we actually got to the airport in Portugal 🙂 We always use the app Hotel Tonight to book last minute hotel rooms and usually get pretty good deals on there. Actually, 3h before we boarded our flight(s) X called the airline to ask if we could hop of in Lisboa (originally just our stop-over) and they told us we couldn’t because we would loose our returning flight. However, she was able to change it and everything worked out just fine.
After all, we arrived in Lisboa Thursday noon, booked the 4 star Tivoli Lisboa Hotel (gorgeous hotel in a great area with a beautiful roof top terrace) at Avenida da Liberdade. We took some pictures, went to a fun food market called Time Out for dinner and worked on our blogs in our comfy hotel bed.
The next day, the weather sucked and it was raining non stop until the afternoon so we just worked on our laptops in the hotel and drove to the old town afterwards. We walked around the city, found a closed restaurant after the other (because Portuguese people love their siesta) until we could finally convince one of the restaurants to still serve us poor hungry girls some food 😉 It actually turned out to be a really good restaurant called Maria Cattita Paseia.
After our much needed late lunch we just went with the flow and found the perfect selfie – light (no joke!) to make a spontaneous 30 min Q&A on our snapchats and have some coffee and deserts. It was so sweet – we actually got interrupted by three portuguese girls who follow my blog and saw my snaps and wanted to say hi! They also told us about the many cute boutiques and great shopping opportunities in Lisboa..
So you can guess three times where we ended up! Boutiques? Not quite! We found out about Bershka, Mango and all these ‘rare’ stores (joke!) and actually went a ‘little’ crazy and ended up with each 15 new pair of jeans, tons of tops, shoes and even a new suitcase for me (at least one thing I REALLY needed) 😉
At night we went to eat some Pizza and salad at a close by restaurant and worked some more. At around 1 am (nigh!!) we realised that we still don’t know how to get to the 3h away city where we would meet up with the rest of the Brunotti crew. After a little research online, we decided it would be best to rent a car and drive ourselves (good decision in general!). After a quite stressful pick-up of our cute white VW polo we made it all the way to the south of Portugal.
And now we are getting closer to the really chaotic part of this little journey. Around 10 am Xenia texts the PR girl from Brunotti, telling her that we won’t make it on time. A few minutes later X looks at her screen reading her reply simply saying ‘NO!’.. Since I already know us so well, I immediately guessed what we had done: “No, noo..seriously?.. It’s tomorrow, isn’t it?” Yes.
Typical us! Sometimes, I truly question myself and life and how we can get through with stuff like this! Haha! But hey, at least we are realising what we’re doing ‘wrong’, right 😉 We did get a little confused by our original travel dates and the flights, thats why we mixed it up in first place. And fair enough, we had a beautiful day at the beach in Lagos..
In the end our ‘little mistake’ turned out to be a pretty good decision after all. We had lunch in Lagos and took some amazing pictures at the beach (I’ve actually broke all my former instagram records and likes during our trip) 😉
At night we finally drove from Lagos to our final destination – a beautiful house in the middle of green fields, mountains and close to the beach. Thanks to our rental car we were able to drive to a close by grocery store and buy some late night food that we prepared in our little ‘house’ 🙂 A pretty fun and unexpected day after all.
The first morning we were supposed to start with an early work out session, but since not all of the girls arrived just yet, Xenia and I had some time to sit down and write about our crazy Portugal adventure on our blogs 🙂 I can’t wait for a fun weekend with lots of work outs, SUP and meeting all the other blogger girls!
We got some amazing active wear from Brunotti and I fell in love with their swim suit that I wore for my first Stand Up Paddlings session. It was so much fun and super relaxing to just be on the water and feel the sun on your skin. The team was amazing and Brunotti had a private chef for us that cooked healthy food and a fitness instructor that warmed us up and did bootcamp sessions with us. Enjoy 🙂
Thank You Brunotti for this wonderful active weekend!
