Tina and I had one hour sit down and relax together before she had to take me to the bus station (because it's just as easy to take a bus into Logan airport as it is to have somebody actually drive in drop you off and then pick you up there later). I count the journey as starting when I leave the house so my journey started Thursday afternoon 1:00 p.m. Eastern standard Time. The journey to the bus station and the bus ride to Logan airport we're very non-eventful. There was a 2-hour delay on our flight because apparently they didn't have a crew. Having a tight connection on the other side of the Atlantic guaranteed a missed flight... Our flight landed in Madrid as my connecting flight was landing in Porto without me. This added a couple of extra hours in the Madrid airport which wasn't squandered!
If you've read some of my previous blog entries, you'll immediately recognize the glorious treat that is KAS LIMON (don't think of it as lemonade or even Italian soda, think of it as mildly diluted lemon juice with just enough sugar to make it palatable - and all my years of searching I have never found anything that is quite as good as that). You bet I enjoyed the hell out of that drink!
Remember how I stated above that the journey started the minute I left the house. So flight delays and rescheduled flights are all just part of the journey. Doesn't really matter too terribly much whether a few hours gets in the way, I'm still going to make it to my ultimate destination which is Santiago de Compostela and I believe with my very heart and soul that when you're on a journey like this it is important to acknowledge the entire journey as part of the experience, embrace it, and find the hidden joys within... And that's going to lead me to another diversion, when we were getting off our flight it was 8:00 a.m. local time in Madrid. Many people were not well rested, struggling with connecting flights, and otherwise not having the best day of their life. I don't know how, I don't know why, but when I was going through the security checkpoint, the gentleman at border security stamped my passport which seems like a routine thing, but you actually have to ask border control in most places to actually stamp it. So when he stamped it I let out a little statement of Glee exclaiming that I was happy that he actually stamped my passport which caught the attention of several other travelers who noticed my happy attitude about things. I think a little bit of rubbed off on a few other people, instead of worrying that they were all tired, some of them started looking forward to getting stamps on their passport as well. I didn't see any sense in being upset over things I couldn't control. The guy checking me through board of security had nothing to do with any of my delays, and if I was a jerk to him he could have added more to my delays. Instead I was the first person he took through the line as he had just opened and I hope I started his shift off on the positive note.
Let's get back to this journey... Let's get back to the physical aspect of this journey!
I finally arrived in Porto around 1:30 in the afternoon and got the keys to my mini apartment that I'm using for a few days.
Everything I need and then some. It is one building away from the portal City Hall, which itself heads a main boulevard that is fantastically beautiful.
Not venturing out further until I had showered, put on clean clothes, and washed my other set. What set me back till about 3:00, which I then wanted to touch base with Tina and give her a video tour of the place and see how she is holding up (she's doing perfectly fine btw and prepping for her own journey in a week). Afterwards I took a stroll over to the local decathlon store and picked up a new set of trekking poles - you can get cheap trekking poles for 6 Euro a piece! I wouldn't hike the Camino with them but for casual use they looked perfectly adequate. A Camino grade set of poles was only 40 Euro for a complete set - I then struck off to the cathedral to meet up with my friend Charlton Slack. My friends Ed and Pat Riskowski have been taking a few zero days to not only indulge in the culture in porto, but to give the both of them some much needed rest from the abuses of the trail that they endured from Lisbon to Porto.
You know all these are signs would probably work much better if this was a theatrical movie and not a blog entry... I could keep everyone captivated with four, five, maybe even six sub stories that all meet together at the end.
Charlton and I, haven't seen each other since October 2015, greeted each other like two friends that hadn't seen each other in a week.
Well we got halfway across the bridge and realize that that's only half the journey we had to completely cross the bridge each way to make it count for us. That's about when we also saw the gondolas on the other side of the river.
Once we were in the gondolas taking them down to water level, it was pointed out that we had tickets for free wine tasting. 20 minutes later and several wrong turns we finally found our free wine tasting.
On our return journey back up the gondolas Charlton and I met two wonderful young men from Russia living in Germany. They both work in software development, one for Audi and BMW developing autopilot software. Because of the Dynamics of their work, they were working out of Porto for a little while before heading back to Germany.
That was mostly an appetizer, as you can see from the picture, so we set out for another round of food with a quick stop back at the decathlon so Charlton could get a 3 Euro slack pack like I have (a 10 l stuff sack with a zipper closure and little straps). We wandered around for a while and stumbled across a place that apparently is called little toast in English. Wanting more snack food, we ordered the meat and cheese plate, it a very generously portioned to cool to replace with three types of local Portuguese cheese along with local cured hams, almost an entire bunch of grapes, raisins, some fruit jam, pumpkin jam, and apparently the namesake some tiny little toasts that are apparently made on site.
Today, was my alleged zero day. My friends Ed and Pat found a private driver to give us a personalized tour of the Douro River valley vineyards -the home of port wine. I will say that there was nothing bad about the tour, and at that point we seem to be always the VIPs over the other tour groups, going into the special tasting rooms where they had not just small samples but larger samples of the wine along with little snacks to cleanse in between samplings.
From there we started to climb the valley, stopping at another vineyard very quick stop and tasting, before climbing more and entering a little nondescript Hamlet completely off the beaten path. We had roast suckling pig leg baked in a port wine reduction, and some of the best roasted potatoes have had. For the health Halo there is some salad and rice to go around. Dessert was an absolutely fantastic homemade orange cake that Ed and I both managed to score a second round of, and even got Avatar operators boss, who was running a second private tour, to give us a serving of black vanilla bean ice cream.
With not much room left, we finished the ascent of the valley and were treated to a rose wine spritzer with lemon peel - it was refreshing, but the bitterness from the soda water did not make it one of our favorites.
That's when we had a little bit of excitement in our day however. I observed our driver was not looking too good when she came to tell us that when we were ready she would bring us back. I noticed she had lost her chipper mood and her voice seemed pained. I also observed when she walked away she actually grabbed a bar for support briefly and paused and uncomfortably long (She was NOT drunk - putting that out there right now!)!!! I didn't immediately pay it too much heat because none of the rest of my group nor the staff over there seem to give it much attention. We wrapped up our stay, but when we headed out to the vehicle we noticed she was sitting down and on the phone and obviously distraught. Luckily her boss had been running a parallel tour with a different group all day and was there wrapping up his group at the same time. We quickly found out that she was 4 months pregnant and having extreme pains. Every single one of us immediately told him to make sure that she was taken care first and once he had her taken care of we would address getting back to Porto.
Somewhere up in that little Hamlet is the tour van we wrote up in, cuz we all packed into her boss's van and made a beeline back for Porto arriving back here an hour and a half after we planned on arriving. As of my writing we do not have an update on her status, but we are comfortable that they put her needs first and foremost.
Arriving back in Porto we got dropped off at River level because that is where most of the occupants were staying. That left me having to get up the river bank and then up the hills to my apartment. My first thought was to walk the streets up, but in that direction they were very crowded already with pedestrians feeling about. My second thought was to ride the funicular up, but the sign said it was a 40-minute wait from that spot and then there was another sign saying the weight was even longer because of some issue they were having. As I turned around to navigate up the roads I spotted a staircase. Climbing the staircase revealed the grand total of 21 sets of stairs along with several steep alleyways all twisting and turning between buildings up the riverbank... Remember I said this was a zero day? Well it may have been zero Camino kilometers but it was not a zero exercise day at all.
Just some pictures of tonight's snack. Yes! Yes, they taste as good as they look!!!
Tomorrow my plan is to do a light day just walk out of the city and up the ocean for a grand total of 10 km. I'll reach the end of the subway line and ride it back into town to enjoy more of what Porto has to offer.
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