Planes, Trains & Automobiles

After a two hour flight to JFK, a four hour layover, a seven hour flight to Paris, a two hour layover, a two hour flight to Lisbon, a four hour layover, a three hour train ride and a ten minute taxi ride, we finally arrived at our AirBnB in Porto!  Whew, we were like Homer on his Odyssey but life is all about the journey after all.

Our host Cristina met us and showed us around our cute home for the next week.  She had all sorts of info about the area for us and as fate would have it, one of our balconies overlooks Graham’s Port Lodge...we will definitely be heading there tomorrow.

As it is Sunday night, most places in the neighborhood are closed but Cristina told us about a spot about 800 meters downhill (Porto is a very hilly city so knowing where the hills are is very important) to the river where there are all sorts of restaurants.  After freshening up a bit (did I mentioned the 24 hours of traveling to get here?!), we took a walk down to the river and found a good Italian restaurant.  Earlier today while waiting at the train station, we had a slab of beef cooked in a pool of butter...we were not quite sure what we were going to get as we figured bife was beef, but we were not confident in the translations we received from Google Translate about the other words describing the beef.  According to Google Translate, we could have been having beef fevers, beef lizards, empty beef, etc.  As tired as we were tonight and determined to stay awake until 11:00pm, we opted for Italian as we knew we could easily figure out what we would be eating.

I mentioned the walk to the river was downhill, right?  So what goes down must come up...therefore we opted for a taxi to bring us home.  If it took us 15 minutes to walk to the river, it would stand to reason a taxi would only take us 5 minutes at most in a car.  Well our driver, Mario Andretti wannabe, had no idea where he was going as he whipped around the curves and hills.  Porto looks like a cute town but at 70 km/h, it was hard to be 100 percent sure.  After 15 minutes of watching our lives pass before our eyes, we finally pulled up Graham’s Port Lodge and told him to bring us there.  We still had to hike up some steps but it was much better than the entire uphill hike.

Now that we met our staying up until at least 11:00pm goal, we can now go to bed and when we wake up in the morning, we will be on local time.  

Boa Noite (good night)

Portugal here we come!

It is time for another AOH adventure and this time we’re heading for Portugal.  We’ll spend a week in Porto in the north and then a week in Lisbon.  Super excited as this is our first trip to Portugal.  Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get on the same transatlantic flight so we’ll meet up in Paris at CDG and then fly to Lisbon together.

This has been such a crazy year leading up to this holiday that I have had little time to do much research and was fortunate to have a flight attendant from Charleston to JFK that goes there all the time.  She pretty much hung out with me (think the other passengers were a little miffed) and told me all kinds great info...especially a little off the beaten path places (my favorite kind of places).  We did watch the Lisbon episode of Somebody Feed Phil when I was in Atlanta a couple weeks ago and if you’ve never watched his series on Netflix, you’re missing out...hysterical and full of great info!  One of the places on my list from the show was Ponto Final in Lisbon and it ended up being one of the places my flight attendant mentioned.  It was on our list so now we definitely have to check it out.  

This trip we’ll be going all AirBnB and have found some really great places at unbelievable prices.  AirBnB also has experiences so we’ve signed up for a couple. One involves several hours sailing and Port tasting so we figured that has to be pretty good.  Julie is a big Port fan and I’ve recently started trying them out and must say they are rather tasty.

Well it is about time to lay back my seat and get comfy for the flight to Paris.  Until later...Va com Deus!  Not sure yet if that is a Portuguese saying or a Brazilian saying as my friends from Brazil say to me every time we say good-bye...guess we will learn soon.