We returned to the airport in the morning, using the same Taxi and paying the same 45 Euros as the day before. The weather was overcast with several cloud layers, starting from around 2000 feet. Our instrument departure out of San Sebastian was "interesting" as it seemed to offer rather low ground clearance. Will investigate later. The flight took us right across Spain to Cascais on the outskirts of Lisbon. Here we landed on the local GA airport which left a very good impression. Extremely friendly people helped to tie our aircraft down, provided transport to the terminal and called a taxi for us.
The taxi took us to Lisbon international airport, where we had booked a card with Europcar. We quickly went through the car-hire procedures, eager to find out if our scooters were still where we left them more than 18 months ago. After we accepted the hired car on the first floor of the parking garage, we loaded our luggage into the car and went for a walk to the parking lot where we had left the scooters under a bridge. Fortunately, our parking spot was only a few hundred meters away from the car-hire garage. Imagine the suspense, as we approached our parking spot! And then - there they were, our well used Vespa ET4 scooters. Still standing in the same spot, although one could see that they had been tampered with. Aside from the rust which had grown noticeably on one of the scooters, and the thick layer of dust and grime, we noticed signs of attempted forced entry into the scooter's storage compartments. Each scooter has 3 compartments and all had been tampered with, in some cases successfully. The front compartment on both scooters had been opened, but there was not much to be found there. The center compartments (under the seat) resisted the break-in attempts. Finally, one of the top cases had been opened and one of our helmets had been stolen, along with the installed intercom rigging.
We were of course very happy to have our scooters back. The next step was to get them back into operational status. We had brought along two new batteries for the purpose. So we walked back to car-hire garage to prepare the batteries for use This involved filling each battery with the supplied asset and leaving the battery alone for 30 minutes. We filled the batteries and went for another walk back to the terminal building to have some coffee. Then back to the car, pick up the batteries and walk back to the scooters. We were of course delighted to find that both scooters started after some cranking and the engines worked as well as ever. Now it was a case of taking each scooter to a nearby petrol station for refueling, washing, tyre pressure adjustment, etc. We got all of that done and finally parked both scooters back under the bridge, ready to be used when required. Due to the fact that we were short of one helmet, we left the scooters at the airport and used our hired car to take us to the hotel right in the center of Lisbon.
We spent the evening enjoying dinner at the "Number 2 Restaurant in Lisbon", following the recommendation of a front desk staff member at our hotel. No doubt that staff member was paid off by the restaurant, because the establishment appeared to be a true rip-off. We ended up paying 3 times (!) the price of similar restaurants in the area, with the total bill coming to around 160 Euros for a two-course meal including wine. Still, we enjoyed the evening, walking through the old part of Lisbon and went to bed happy to have achieved a lot for the day.
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