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)