Chicago to Lisbon by way of New Jersey

Today begins at 3:30am in the airport hotel in Chicago.  3:30am seems really early, but that's what it took to get on the 4:20am shuttle

We look pretty chipper for being that early.

Midway was crowded, but we got through smoothly enough, although Elodie was flagged when she tried to bring her half-full water bottle collection through.

We mostly snoozed on the two hour flight to Newark where I'm writing this part of the entry.  Unfortunately, our flight to Lisbon doesn't leave until 5:45pm and we can check-in until 2:15pm... so that leaves a fun-filled 4 more hours in pre-security down time.  It seems excessive now, but the plan was to book the first flight from Midway to allow for unforeseen mishaps.  Thankfully, those did not occur.  It's also nice that EWR has more services pre-security than most airports I've visited recently.

5:15am, the next day...

After waiting in EWR for a good 5 hours before we could check in on our TAP flight, we had an uneventful 6 hour flight from Newark to Lisbon.

The flight arrived in Lisbon just after 5am. Even after going through passport control and claiming luggage, that was still much to early to get into our apartment or even use a luggage storage service. So... we did what we had become expert at... we waiting in the arrivals hall at the Lisbon airport for about 90 minutes... hey there was a Starbucks and free wifi. :-) 

Elodie had her first "purchase with Euros experience"... she got an iced green tea.

Eventually, we hooked up with our airport transfer service (booked through TAP) and got a ride to the luggage storage service we chose.  After confirming that our apartment would be ready at 11:30am, we had a quick clothes change, deposited luggage and set off for our first round of Lisbon sights.