Our priority list for the day included the following: Find a new helmet for me, find the correct speaker / microphone set for installation in the new helmet, matching the one in Vero's helmet, and find a motorbike workshop which would be willing to work on our scooters the next day while we waited. I am happy to say that we were able to resolve all three issues.
The day started with heavy rain and it never really stopped raining for the whole day. After breakfast we spent some time searching the net for some suitable motorbike dealers. We eventually left the hotel and used our hired car to drive to an industrial area outside Lisbon where we found a Honda dealer and I purchased a suitable helmet. The Honda dealer had done some research for us with regards to the Interphone F4 communications system that we required and concluded that there was no representation for the equipment in Portugal.
We decided to do our own research nevertheless and spent another few hours in a cafe inside a big shopping centre where we used our iPads to find more information. The time was well spent as we came up with addresses for both a Yamaha dealer who appeared to stock Interphone equipment as well as the address of the Piaggio agent in Lisbon. This may sound like a simple exercise, but in reality it's not that easy. For starters, all the info is of course in Portuguese. It also doesn't help that some critical Web sites, like the official Vespa site for Portugal, is Flash based and hence not viewable on an iPad. Suffice to say that such research is rather time consuming and does not always yield the expected results. This pretty much confirms our experiences from when we did similar research for Palma de Mallorca two years ago.
We paid the Yamaha dealer a visit and were very happy to find the correct Interphone equipment for the new helmet. Better still, the dealer promised to look at our scooters during the next morning to fix some small issues while we waited.
By now it was late afternoon and we returned to our hotel. We had dinner (Groupera and Bacalhau a Braz) at a restaurant just around the corner from our hotel.
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