Our train ride to Lisbon was uneventful, but I must say I’m really shocked at how quickly one has to board the train, and how quickly it leaves some stations. When it arrived in Porto we barely got our luggage in the overhead rack before it seemed to start moving. Some people were still filing by to get their seats, in fact. Lesson learned: BE QUICK! At one of the stations where it stopped it was there for all of one minute. Second lesson … BE QUICK! Hah!
We arrived at Santa Apolonia station and looked at a map to see how long a walk might take us. Thirty minutes. In warm weather. Nope. So a cab it was. I think we probably would have gotten lost if we’d tried to walk in any case!
Our place is small, clean, and lovely. We were greeted by Ana (if I understood things correctly she, her son, and her nephew run Courtesy Morning, the rental company for a number of places. If you come here DO check them out!), who went over SO much information about where to go and what to do I thought we really should spend weeks here, rather than days, but we’ll do what we can, and perhaps we’ll have to return someday. Ana also provided us with some port and pastel de nada. Nice! She was really quite wonderful, and I know we are going to have fun here!
Now I’m going to attempt to post photos that are less large. I hope this means they load better for people. Eventually I will redo all the prior posts and make those smaller as well, but probably not tonight.
After hanging up clothes and settling in (and enjoying our port wine and pastel de nada), we went out to search out dinner. Ana had a lovely list of places to go, one of wish was right out the door. But we thought we’d venture further and see what we could fine. Welllll … after walking a wee bit (I will NOT get my steps and miles in today) we headed right back to that first place. Oh my goodness it was delicious! I won’t be at all surprised if we end up back there. A 30 second walk and we are back at “our” place (pretty much behind Dan’s head). I could get used to this!
And that’s it for today … now I’ll post this and see if the images work well enough and load faster. If anyone out there has opinions … well … I know you’ll let me know!