
Day 3 of our Porto visit was our longest excursion of the trip as we boarded a tour boat for a leisurely cruise up the Douro River through two locks to Régua and the beginning of the Douro Valley wine region, visited a local winery, then returned to Porto via the Miradouro Train. We boarded…

The Portuguese have a saying: “Braga prays, Coimbra studies, Porto works, and Lisbon gets the money and parties”. For our second full day in Porto, we scheduled a private tour north of Porto to the Minho region to find Portugal’s roots in the towns of Braga and Guimarães. We found the tour on Viator, provided…

For our first full day in Porto, our plan was a morning walking tour Paula booked through Tours By Locals, then lunch, then across the bridge to Vila Nova de Gaia (usually just called Gaia) for a port house tour in the afternoon. The original tour we booked was a half-day with a professionally licensed…

Unlike our Iceland, Greenland, Canada cruise (Note 5 through Note 25), where I blogged almost every day, I’m writing about our Portugal trip after our return. It will probably be a few days between posts as I process all of our pictures. We substituted this trip for our cancelled trip to Israel and used the…

Expected weather: Hi 72F / Low 49F (historic average ranges for Porto and Lisbon during this time) We are about to leave for Portugal. I gave a high-level overview of what we were thinking back in Note 28, but here is what we have now planned. Day 1 – Lisbon to Porto We should arrive…

I suspect that you’ve all been wondering where we planning to travel next. Well, it isn’t where we thought we’d be going when we returned from Iceland last September! I was going to wait a few weeks after my review of that trip and announce our next trip, but 3 weeks later it became apparent…