Portugal stay #4 – Porto
Thursday
We drove into Porto. Alyssa did an incredible job of navigating the narrow streets to our new apartment. Not even one accident!
Our new place was very cool. It had a walk-out balcony and large bedroom up a flight of stairs, with a trundle bed for Sawyer.
After we checked in, we met up for dinner with Rita, Gregg and Trudy. While most of the crew hung out with Sawyer at a nearby playground, Alyssa and I had a mission to cruise around the neighborhood to try to find a place for us all to eat. Our first choice restaurant, “Brick” was closed
(and continued to be closed every time we tried to go back throughout our stay), so we took their recommendation and headed through some of the narrow alleys to a small restaurant named “Miss O’vo” a few blocks down the street.
Friday
Slept in. I made a morning run to get cappuccinos and pastries.
Got tickets for hop-hop off bus while Sawyer spent some time at the park playground again. The bus was a double-decker with an open top, which sawyer was pretty excited about.
We rode down to the river and had a lunch with a view, then boarded an hour long “6-bridges” boat tour that gave us some of the sights of Porto from the water.
After our boat ride we went across the river to the area of Porto famous for it’s port cellars. We did a cellar tour of Cálam, which actually turned out to be cooler than I thought it would be. I was expecting a simple tasting at a counter, but it was actually a pretty elaborate set of interactive exhibits, which Sawyer liked a lot, a tour of the cellars, which had some pretty impressive giant barrels aging, and a tasting where we met a really nice couple and their daughter from Dubai.
Next we headed back to our neighborhood and hoofed it across town trying to find a nice spot for dinner. We failed a couple times at trying to get a spot at too-crowded popular restaurants, and hunger and weary feet led us to an outdoor seating place not far from a main square. Alyssa wasn’t totally thrilled with it, but my grilled fish was pretty Good
So it was a pretty busy day. Sawyer was s trooper all day, and we chalked it up to a win across the board.
Saturday
We dawdled around again in the morning and headed out late, hoping to get a spot at a restaurant we’ve had our eye on for lunch. Things got off to a rocky start with wrong restaurant opening times, not-good snacks, and a really really long bus ride to the Foz neighborhood.
We were a little deflated when we got to Foz, but it all turned around when we had lunch at Don Zefarino, where we had some mind-blowing grilled fish, and had a great rapport with our server Joseph. With spirits lifted, we spent some tome in the neighborhood, me walking to the (closed) marked, and Alyssa and Sawyer headed to the beach.
The beach, by the way, was beautiful. Super fine white sand as far as you could see and super clean. We found a little playground and bought some sand toys for Sawyer and hung there for a while. We probably didn’t spend as much time here as we would have liked, and we didn’t have our swim gear with us, which was too bad. I’ve made a mental note to go back next time I’m in Porto.
When we got back to our neighborhood, we decided to take it easy and just do a picnic dinner on our balcony. So we got some take-out sandwiches and chilled out for the evening
Sunday
Time to pack up and head to our next home! Nothing very notable about our morning of packing our bags, but…before we left town we did get a proper restaurant brunch. Oh poached eggs and proper coffee, how I missed you so!