Port Lodges are amazing!

 

Wow!  To say that we had a very busy and full day would truly be an understatement!  Not sure how we managed, but we left the hotel about 9 am and just got back, and it’s already after 5 pm!  I also have a Friends, Romans, Countrymen announcement to make to all friends and family back home:  Be prepared to be served some wonderful Port from Portugal when you next come to our house!  Not sure what we’ve had before in the U.S. labeled Port but it certainly wasn’t what we had today.  To be honest, in three separate tastings we’ve sampled everything from white to Tawny and Ruby (the only thing we’ve actually missed is Rosé!) and loved it all!  But to start from the beginning…

Our first trolley, right in front of the hotel!

Definitely vintage!

Beautiful tiles on the building!

Me on trolley!

Down to the Douro river

Along the river 

Out boat for the tour

Looking up at the Luis I bridge; we walked over it yesterday!

The remains of a very fortified city!

Luis I bridge

With tram going over it!

Sao Francisco chapel ceiling

A beautiful building!

Our first two glasses of port!

At the base of the Luis I bridge in Gaia, across the river

Calem -- Lovely port lodge!

Now those are BIG barrels!

Kinds of port

Majestic Cafe!

Excellent vegetable soup

R's fish

My spaghetti!

Up around 7 am and down for breakfast about 8 am.  Very good buffet, with lots of interesting things to try.  Then, catching up on accounts and reading until a little after 9 am when we went out across the square to Santander bank to get out an additional 200€.  Now I feel adequately funded for Vila Nova de Foz Coa where we will be looking at Neolithic paintings and etchings in a few days and where the museum requires cash payment for their tours.

From Santander, we went back to the Batalha Square and found the trolley stop for #22 right in front of the hotel.  Sure enough, the trolley arrived right on time, 9:32 am and we were off and running! We bought ourselves two two-day passes, paying a total of 20€.  (Each one-way trip on the trolley costs 3.50€each; 7€for the two of us.  So, by paying 10€each, we can ride anywhere the trolley goes for two entire days!)  The first trolley, #22 took us to the end of its line, where we transferred to trolley #18, which was in the same square as the #22.  From there, we actually went down to the riverside and picked up the last trolley -- #1 – which took us along the river and close to the boats we wanted to take.  The trolley cars themselves were wonderful – wooden and vintage 1909-1910, and they came complete with seats that were able to be turned around at the end of the route, just like we had seen years ago in New Orleans.  

This took us to Cruze Douro, where we were assigned to the 11 am cruise in English.  As we had about 45 minutes to wait, we found a nice café on the waterfront.  Robert had a cup of Café Americano, and I had a great cup of hot chocolate with Chantilly cream.  YUM!  We were, of course, the first folks on board the cruise, which went up river past five bridges, and then back down river, almost to the Atlantic, where we crossed under the last of the six bridges.  Really, truly windy and cold heading toward the Atlantic, but much nicer and calmer heading inland again.  Great fun, for sure!

Once off the ship, we decided to explore some of the local sites in the area.  The first was the Sao Francisco church, which was just a couple of blocks UP the street.  [Note from Robert: It seems that everything in Porto is up!] This church was really beautiful.  In fact, it really knocked my socks off, as it seems that the entire inside of the church was entirely covered with gold leaf!  Maybe that was why they didn’t allow any pictures of the church itself.  We also toured their chapel, which was beautiful without all the gold leaf, and parts of the treasury that were open.  We skipped the opportunity to go into what was described as the “spooky” part of the cellar, where (apparently) the bones of many of the parishioners have ended up. Sorry, Brenda, but I prefer the no bones approach to my churches!

From there, we headed up the street and past the Stock Exchange Palace to the Port Wine Institute offices.  This was very interesting, and had been recommended to us by the young man in the Tourist Information office yesterday.  They have a wonderful room filled with maps and photos of many of the Douro wine region areas, along with lots of information about how port wine is made; what it’s made from, and how it’s grapes are cellared and stored.  Really interesting!  Then, after you go through that, they have a “select it yourself” selection of bottles of port that you can try if you like.  You insert a card into the machine and select the port you want to try. Really neat!  Robert selected the 40-year old Tawny Port, and I took a 10 year old Ruby port.  Both were so excellent that we opted to try two more tastes, as well as buy a bar of dark chocolate with sea salt to accompany our tastes.  I think that was lunch…

From there, it was now about 2 pm and we were due at Burmester for our special tasting at 3 pm.  It didn’t seem to make much sense to go back to the hotel, so we decided to Uber over to the other side of the river – Gaia, where all of the port Lodges are located. It truly took just a few minutes for our Uber driver to find us, and then just another two minutes for him to get us to the other side of the river; all in all, I think the ride cost about 2.50€!  (But, of course, then we tipped him.)  As we still had about an hour until Burmester, we decided to walk down the quai to Calem port lodge.  Here, we thought we might be able to get a tour first, but they told us it would take about an hour.  So, instead, we opted to taste here and come back for the Calem tour tomorrow morning (after laundry!).  

I had two tastes of white port, and R had their vintage 30-year-old port and a 10-year as well.  It’s nice, as we could both taste both flights, and all of the wines were excellent. Truly, we have yet to find a port wine that wasn’t wonderful!  Who knew?! And, the nice thing about Calemis that they ship to the U.S.!  Finally tore ourselves away from Calem to be in time for our fabulous Burmester tour!  The gal giving the tour was really knowledgeable and we very much enjoyed spending time with her.  It was interesting, though, that when we got to the end of the tour – the tastings, we were the only folks on our tour of about 18-20 people to pick the “special” tour – so they all got to sit at one table and have two tastes, while we got our own long table with three tastes – a white port, a Ruby Port called Sotto Voce and a 10-year Tawny Port – including both milk and dark chocolate!

Well, maybe we had just had too much port, but there wasn’t a bad bottle in the entire lot!  According to the rules, we can ship only six bottles to a single address, so we ended up sending six bottles of Sotto Voce to our house, and six bottles of 10-year Tawny to Bob and Stew (which I still have to tell them about…).  Hmmm…definitely time to get back to the hotel so we can go out for dinner at a decent hour! 

More later (says she hopefully!)  And we still have one more entire day in Porto, or at least we do once we get the laundry done!

Much love,

m

xxx

Just back from dinner at the Majestic Café!  Wow!  What a place, and only a couple of blocks from our hotel.  The Majestic is definitely of the Belle Époque era, and was almost full when we got there about 6:30 pm.  The interesting thing about the place is that they are open from breakfast time in the morning until about 10 pm each night, and their wait staff really knows their stuff!  We were seated and presented with menus and had a lovely full meal, and whenever one of the wait staff came by, they would check that all was well and remove or replace things on our table. There certainly wasn’t much of a wait for our food or drinks to arrive, and all in all, we had a really nice meal! We started with their bread with olive oil, tuna tartare and olives.  The tuna really wasn’t “tartare” but rather tuna salad, which spread beautifully on their wonderful rolls.  Then we both had bowls of their delicious and very warm (temperature-wise) vegetable soup. Just what was needed on a cold and rainy night like this!  (Some rain had been forecast for about 5-6 pm, and sure enough, it was misting when we got outside the hotel, and rained quite a bit while we were having dinner! Fortunately for us, the rain had stopped by the time we had to walk back to the hotel – where, as usual, our umbrellas were nice and warm and dry!)  Robert ordered grilled sea bass that came with boiled potatoes and vegetables, and I ordered my true comfort food – spaghetti bolognaise!  YUM!  (This time, though, I didn’t clean my entire plate, but I came close!)  We were both too full after that to even think about dessert, so headed back to the hotel and we night owls are in for the night!

Lots of love,

m

xxx