Post-vacation Thoughts and Synopsis

Post-vacation thoughts.

I am amazed that the trip worked as smoothly as it did. This is a testament to Chris's fantastic planning skills, and I guess I will take some credit too, as I plan all of the transportation.

Chris spent many hours reading guidebooks, and checking out all of the details for the sights that we wanted to see. There were so many other great-sounding places that we'll have to save for next time.

My job was to map the sights out and connect them in a way that could be done. And I had to make a few cuts as well, unfortunately, based on geography. There is only so much time in a day, and you can't spend it all driving. This is especially true in November, when it gets dark before 6:00.

Speaking of driving. It was generally pretty easy, even in the small towns. Parking was plentiful and traffic was rarely an issue. Perhaps November is off-season? I definitely would have preferred a smaller car, for the smaller-scale roads and villages, but we managed with the big clunker that they gave me. It was only annoying in Porto.

I am really glad that I was somewhat prepared for the electronic tolls. That would have been a disaster otherwise. I followed up with Hertz and they apologized, and said that the plate pass should have been made available to me. I saved probably €20 doing it myself, but I would have happily paid the extra for that convenience.

Is there anything I would have done differently? Probably a few minor things.

In retrospect, I would have preferred to have stayed outside of Porto, somewhere along the Douro. The ideal situation would be to stay in a smaller town where we could have taken the train in and out of Porto for sightseeing, in order to avoid driving in the city traffic. That ate up a lot of time. I think Guimarães might be a nicer base for exploring the region next time.

Or, I would have loved to return the car to Hertz, and take the train into Porto for our stay. We looked at options to get rid of the car during our time in Porto, but since we wanted to see sites north of Porto, where there is no train, that wasn't an option. Also it's tough to get from Porto to Salamanca without driving, especially if you want to make stops along the Douro as we did. So the car was a necessary impediment during our time there.

We also never went for a "real" wine tasting at a winery along the Douro. I had assumed that we'd make time for it, but we were doing so much other stuff that there was just no way to squeeze it in. It turned out OK, because we tasted lots of different wines with meals, and we did the mini-tastings in Porto and at Pacheco.

One other thing - the wine checks work great, but we need to invest in some that have wheels. They are easy to handle when empty, but even though they are small and only hold 6 bottles, they get heavy after dragging them around for a few minutes. Either that, or we need to start hitting the weights.

What were the highlights?

We were amazed at how cheap the food was, outside of the cities. We'd eaten in Lisbon a few times and even there, it's cheaper than much of the rest of Europe. But in the small towns, a full meal with wine is easily had for €40 or less. And the food was delicious. We never had a meal that we didn't really enjoy - whether it was a simple rustic meal in a small town, or the fancy meals in Porto.

The real revelation was the Portuguese wines. They make delicious white wines for under €10, and spectacular full-bodied red wines for under €20. The quality of the wine, considering the price, makes for an amazing value. And even better, the markups on wines in restaurants is not that much. There were times that we looked at the wine list and had to do a double take before we believed that the prices were for a bottle, not just a glass.

There are so many regions to explore here, and so much to sample beyond Port Wine. We hardly drank any "traditional" aged Port. Instead, we enjoyed the crisp acidic white wines from Alentejo and their medium-bodied minerally reds, the delicious Alvarinhos from the Vinho Verde region which tasted of sea air and went perfectly with seafood, and the complex, full-bodied reds from the Douro which stood up to even the heaviest dishes. We could have easily brought back more than we did. Unfortunately, we just don't see those wines here very often in our local stores. So we will ration our supply to keep the memory fresh.

We had heard that the Douro Valley was beautiful, and that lived up to expectations even though the weather was crummy and the vines were past peak. We were not sure what to expect from the Portuguese countryside, especially the Alentejo region. The mountains, the castles, and the landscape were stunningly beautiful. It is a place that will remain in our memory for a long time, and I hope that we can revisit for a longer journey.