Porto -

Porto – The word of the day is Port! The name Porto is derived from the Latin word Portus meaning a sea port which also provided us with the Italian word Porto. Often we would see it as Oporto which is the English version of Porto.  

Why does every journey have a last stop? Why is there ever a stop? This is where this one ends. We have decided we could keep on traveling, except… and, there could be no finer city to end this journey than in Porto, Portugal. A beautiful city on the Atlantic with both coastal waters and a river running through it. It’s always the river running through it that reveals a city’s history. Missoula Montana, Wharton Texas and Austin Texas. Pick it. The Douro River’s history has its own story to tell and what a story it is.

Almost forever, there have been people that have known how to convert the sugars in grapes into wine. It’s well covered in the biblical stories. There is no other region in the Iberian Peninsula more well known for wines than the Douro Valley. Portugal's most famous wines come from here. 

I don’t know whether the word of the day references port in the sense of a seaport or a port in the sense of wine. Perhaps it’s both. In the mountains of the Douro Valley, the people had been growing grapes and making wine for a long time. The Brits and Scots discovered it and started a trade business with the vineyards. But sea travel was hard in those days and spoilage was common. Someone figured out that if you took a wine, during its late fermentation stage, and mixed in a stronger liquor like a brandy, you could preserve the wine for longer. The secret is that the fermentation stops when the brandy is added. The wine remains sweeter since the sugar content is higher and the alcohol content is greater due to the introduction of the distilled spirit. It became feasible to transport on ships without the spoilage. I think the Scots would say everyone is a winner, but we now have Port wines.

We've had a lot of guests in hotel rooms, but this is the first time we have had a horse. This hobby-horse was in a small alcove in our room that was good for nothing else, but it kept us happy.

Beside our bed was a neon light inviting us to stay in bed. As much as we would have liked, we had a lot to see.

The thing that's nice about a river town is that the river is always present. Wherever you are in the city, it's just there!

The Douro River starts in Spain and winds its way down through mountains and ends up dumping into the sea in Porto. Through a series of locks and dams, the river is navigable up to the Douro Valley. It is totally impossible to describe, or picture, through photographs, the beauty of the Douro Valley. Probably 15 miles from end to end. Nothing but green-vineyards with grapes and olive trees. As far as you can see. We took a simple, old-fashioned, train to make our way up to the valley. It's only 400 feet above sea level although the mountains may be another 600 - 1,000 feet higher. 

Since the banks of the mountains are steep, sometimes up to 30 degrees, this requires special landscaping to terrace the land into flat spots, held up by retaining walls. Sometimes the flat area only had room for one row of vines, at other times, when the slope was not as great, there might be 4 or 5 rows before the terracing. But the terracing was the only way to hold both the vines and the other plants around the vines and to protect the soil from erosion.   

We visited two wineries, both within walking distance of the train station in Pinhẩo. One was the Quinta do Bomfim and the other was the Quinta das Carvalhas. When we first arrived we went to the Bomfim and the earliest tour available was 2:30 so we found a small café in town and had some lunch. One of the things we ordered was a link of chorizo that is cooked at your table over an open alcohol flame in a special ceramic tray. It was a unique experience and delicious.

We then walked across the river bridge and did a tasting of wines from Quinta das Carvalhas. This was a delightful experience. We were paired with a couple from Australia who were a lot of fun. They were somewhere around 30 years old and they are taking off for a year to do some traveling. She is originally from Poland and her parents are still there. He's from Australia and they both live in Sidney now. They are both engineers, he's a civil engineer and she is a construction engineer. They bought a camper van and have been driving it all over Europe since March. We talked about trips ahead of them and it was fun to watch the excitement as they described their adventure. We also all enjoyed our wine tasting. Susanne did the white tasting and Malcolm did the port tasting. By doing this, and sharing each glass, we were able to taste 8 wines and they were all different. At the end of the tasting, the gentleman describing the wines brought out a 30 year old port wine and it was phenomenal. We understand why someone would chose this wine as a sipping wine after dinner. 

What a way to tour Europe for an extended stay/

Notice the terraced wall. Pretty steep slope to the mountains.

One of the vineyards had trails marked out through the vineyard. A nice way to spend an hour or so.

You can see how steep the vineyards are.

We then walked back across the river and did a tasting at the Bomfim winery. The two individuals describing the wines to us could not have been more different. We found the Carvalhas tasting to be more helpful and knowledge based and a better all around experience. 

We headed back to the train to go to Porto. We had not bought any wines but we had a lot of fun. On the way back we stopped into the place we had lunch, and got one of the ceramic cooking dishes to try cooking sausage at home over the open flame. 

The train, running along the river made the entire experience. If we had just ridden the train up and back it would have been worth the time and effort. One fun observation we made along the river was that there seemed to be a lot of prickly pear cactus. It seemed strange to us to see so close to a river but the Douro is actually a fairly dry area with a limited rainfall. The vineyards are into irrigation and use the latest technology for measuring soil moisture content and and other viniculture techniques to manage their crops..  

Porto is a great city to explore by boat. We did two tours of the river, one was two hours on a sailboat and the other was an hour on a tour boat. There's just something about being on the water that slows life's pace down. Time moves slower. Not much to say about the boats except they allowed us to experience more enjoyable water time. The sailboat reminded us of the sailboat that we had in the 1990s, and brought back a flood of wonderful memories.  

Some people look at home on a sailboat. 

We visited the Lavaria Lello, a famous bookstore in Porto. Purportedly, this is where J K Rowling is credited with sourcing some of her ideas for the Harry Potter series.

One day we decided to get out of town and go out to the point where the Douro meets the Atlantic at a place called Foz. We rode a classic streetcar and ended up about a half mile short of the ocean. It turned out that the day was Portugal Day and a lot of places were closed. So we found a small street café for lunch. Susanne finally got her desire to get some grilled sardines. We haven't talked about food much since we left Morocco. The food in Portugal is very good but the fish is outstanding. Being right on the ocean, the fish is always fresh. We never went wrong ordering fish.

The historic street car #18 that took us to the Atlantic.

On our train ride, we became aware that some of the best art in the country is inside of the Porto and Pinhẩo.train stations. Here are some pictures. These paintings, all on tiles, were also on outside walls of some of the churches.

Here is a painting on the side of a church.

What you are looking at is the bark of a tree, stripped off of the tree. This is cork in its original state.

As our stay in Portugal came to an end and we packed for home we were flooded with mixed emotions. First was the excitement of going home, being with our dog Olie, who we had not seen in two months, and getting to see our son and daughter-in-law. But we were also saddened by the end of the trip. We could have kept on going. But in the words of Jackson Brown, "..all good things, gotta come to an end..." 

We hope you have enjoyed following us on this journey. Standing on a long strand of beach, in Foz, at the eastern edge of the Atlantic in Portugal, our perceptions of ourselves are so small. Our gift has been to be on this journey, and our hearts are so full. 

May you all be blessed and may your journeys be many.