Exploring Porto

May 29, 2024

I wasn’t surprised when I woke up this morning and it was only 6:45. It felt like I had slept a long time, but in reality it was less than 6 hours. Dumb jet lag. Tom was up shortly after me and we got ready to tackle the day.

We looked at the Portugal guide book and decided to do a walking tour. I took pictures of the pages in the book to reference, and we were off. The first stop on the tour was a cathedral. We found it easily and I was surprised at how close our AirBnB was to it. We had actually walked by it last night but we were on the back side of it and didn’t realize it. We snapped some pictures outside (realized we forgot the selfie stick at home . . doh!) and decided to pay the 6 Euro/person to go inside. I’m glad we did. We didn’t just get into the interior of the cathedral, but also the courtyard and chapels, and one of the towers. When we were done exploring we tried to find the next stop in the book, but had determined we were both getting hangry and opted for a quick bite instead.

We tried the local bakery favorite pastel de nata, which is a custard tart. It was very good and just enough of a small bite to avert the hangriness. We then set to walk across the upper deck of the Ponte de Dom Luis I bridge that we had walked across the lower deck the previous night. We got some good pictures and turned around to go back to go to the next stop on the walking tour, the Escadas do Codecal, an old stairway down to the river. Once again we found that we had actually walked up these stairs last night! It was like did the walking tour in reverse last night, but didn’t even know we were doing it. Once we realized this tour was taking us to places we had already been, we decided to walk along the river and then find the nearest bus stop for the hop-on hop-off tour. There was a little store for the bus tour right where we came off the river so I popped in and asked where the nearest stop was. We were super close and just had to walk about a block down the road by the McDonald’s. I had remembered seeing this McDonald’s on the tour yesterday and knew the stop he described.

We walked to the stop and checked the time table for when the next bus was due to show up. It was supposed to have arrived at 12:10 and it was now 12:13. We thought we might have just missed it, but I didn’t think we had because I didn’t see it pass us as we were walking to the bus stop and the traffic was quite slow in the area. We had discussed going into the McDonald’s to check out what different things might be on the menu while we waited, but I had a gut feeling the bus was coming so we stayed put. Sure enough, we saw the bus coming a few minutes later.

We took the bus to the 1st stop on the route so we could switch and catch the Orange line bus that would take us on a tour on the opposite side of the river (and the part of the tour that we did not do yesterday). There wasn’t much to see on that side of the river but there were a couple of good photo ops.

While on the bus tour we recognized the street our AirBnB is on.

Back at stop #1 we once again switched buses and hopped back on the blue line. Our plan was to take the bus and get off at the stop by the beach. Much like Milwaukee is cooler by the lake, it was MUCH cooler and windier at the ocean in Porto. The beach side had kind of a haze floating over it and the sand was really whipping. That didn’t stop us from walking and me looking for any kind of treasures. I did find a couple of pieces of sea glass, so I felt satisfied. We continued to walk towards the Forte de Sao Francisco Xavier and to the next bus stop. Along the way there was another small stretch of beach that had more pebbles and glass to be found. Tom pulled me off the beach just in time for us to catch the bus. We literally walked right to the bus stop and got on the bus. I wouldn’t have been mad if we missed it though . . . there was more treasure to be found.

We got off at the next stop which was at the mouth of the river and made it our goal to find something to eat. We walked a short ways before we came upon a series of restaurants. We chose one that served pizza and shared one that had ham, arugula, olive oil, burrata cheese, and parmesan cheese. It was sooo good!! On top of the great pizza, next door was a gelato place. We shared a Banana and Cookie gelato cone. Yup, it tasted pretty similar to banana cream pie and yes I did pick this flavor since our anniversary is tomorrow and it is tradition to eat our wedding dessert of banana cream pie on our anniversary. I think the chances us of getting pie tomorrow are slim, but I’m happy we had the gelato.

We continued to walk along the river and there was a bit of beach and bank for me to walk as well. I found some more sea glass while Tom walked the sidewalk above. It’s so great that we each get to be in our happy place here. He absolutely loves the European city life and I love a beach. We walked until we came upon another one of our hop-on hop-off stops. We only had to wait a couple of minutes before the bus was pulling up. We had not intentionally planned it that way, but it just seemed to be working out that way all day.

It’s like the people who built this bench knew it was facing the sun and people would want to sit and soak it all up!!

We took the bus for just a couple of stops before we hopped back off where we started at the McDonald’s. We went into the McDonald’s just to look at the menu and use the bathroom. Nothing really out of the ordinary jumped out at me from the menu. I went up the couple flights of stairs to the bathroom just to find you need an access code on your receipt to open the doorway to the bathrooms. Well we hadn’t bought anything and I didn’t have to go that bad so we just left.

From here we started heading back to our BnB and found a nice pedestrian walkway with tons of little shops and restaurants. It was a pleasant stroll and the next thing I knew I recognized a cross street as the one our BnB is on. It’s interesting that after 24 hours we are starting to recognize where we are and our bearings. Things are way closer than they seemed yesterday. Instead of going back to our BnB we decided to continue to walk to find another church we had passed on the bus tour. Just when we thought we had figured Porto out we realized we didn’t know which way to go to find the church. As we were wandering I did see a sign of a place that Tom had mentioned of where we need to go tomorrow to meet our tour for the Douro Valley. We decided to ditch the attempt on the church and find the meeting place instead. We found it and now feel better for our early morning tomorrow. The meet-up location is not far from where we were yesterday for the apartment offices. We took a different street back and found a sizable grocery store. I went in and found 1.5 Liter of water for only .27 Euros. Not bad since the .75 Liter of water I bought at a mini-market yesterday was 1.50 Euro. We headed back to our BnB where Tom took a nap and I began writing this entry.

We at lunch at 4:00 so that I kind of screwed up our appetites for dinner, but we headed out at 9:30 anyway to see what we could find. We headed back to the pedestrian walkway we had discovered and after walking all the way down it, nothing drew us in so we walked back up past where we had started and found a quaint little restaurant. We shared a ham and cheese board, mushroom risotto, and an apple crumble for dessert. It was all very good and just enough food.