We knew today would be a slow day since we either had a train or bus midday, so we arrived at the breakfast room after 8:00. Throughout the night, when I was awake, I’d check the train site and see no news about cancelations and also saw that they were still selling tickets for today’s trains. Same thing when I woke. Same thing when in the breakfast room.
Then Dan checked the news. All trains were canceled.
I guess the train company will still happily sell tickets? Or maybe once you get to the payment page it then doesn’t work. Who knows? But in any case, this saved us a trip to the train station to see if our train would be one to still be working. I’m tremendously grateful for the Facebook Portugal page I visit: a man who lives here had suggested to everyone visiting that we schedule a bus just to be on the safe side. If we didn’t use it, the loss was rather minimal (for us it was under $10). I’m not sure if I can get refunded the $34 we paid for the train, but that, too, isn’t a huge amount so if we don’t get it returned I won’t be weeping buckets.
After breakfast Dan spent time writing in his journal, and I spent time trying to communicate with a few people. For some reason email wasn’t sending via the Apple mail app today, yet the outgoing mail would disappear. Ah, the woes of my life! (JOKING!) So on to the browser I went, and emails were sent. (That last sentence is your poem for the day, btw.) Showers were taken. And then, after packing, it was time to go downstairs to see if we could print up our luggage tags the bus company provides, as well as our bus tickets. Yes, they could. Done.
We walked to the bus station and eventually our bus showed up. It was nearly full, but we all have assigned seats so no problem getting to where we needed to be. Then off we went.
About an hour and twenty minutes later we were at the Porto Campanhã station. Hello Porto! We were told by our walking company, Portugal Green Walks, to meet our driver at the ticket area for the train station rather than at the bus end of the building. It was a trek, but we got there (he was probably waiting for a good fifteen minutes), and our driver took us to our hotel. We are staying at the Porto Neya hotel. It’s very “green oriented” and is quite a nice hotel. Green Walks is responsible for choosing this hotel for us, and they are in charge of the next six nights as well, so I look forward to seeing where we will be staying!
After getting situated in our room we walked east (at least I think it’s east) to the Ribiera to see if we could get a light meal. Heh. Hardly need to write “if” as it’s a huge tourist spot. The meal wasn’t cheap, but still quite welcome.
Then it was back to the hotel. I didn’t really think to take more than this one photo below. I think my brain is still on the bus.
We were to meet soon with someone from Green Walks to go over our trip. He arrived early, and we went down to meet him and get what we needed. This company is quite organized: we have a booklet, vouchers for our stays and boat trip, a map app (really a bike app but it works for walkers as well) that will even let us know if we are off route, and they also gave us t-shirts and a power bank. Nice!
Then back to our room we went, and eventually we had to decide what to do for dinner. Dan did a bit of a search (at least I think so) for spots, but because our hotel is a bit away from the main drag, and because we know tomorrow is an early rising day, we finally opted to go to the rooftop bar and see if they had things that were going to fill us up enough that we could just eat there. The server said they had “snacks”. Now, to us, snacks means things like potato chips, olives, peanuts, and the like. But we decided to give it a go. He brought the menu. Ohhhh riggghhhht. “Snacks” means “tapas”! So there was certainly enough to fill us and keep us from going to the restaurant at the hotel (which would have been much more expensive). The view was lovely, and we had a very relaxing time.
ADDED NOTE: Oh … I nearly forgot: the bar is on the rooftop. The restaurant is on the ground floor. My guess is the food comes from the latter. I noticed a robot bringing food to our server. I felt like I was in the Jetsons!
Back at our room I thought to shoot a photo through our window, despite the reflections. The smarter person in the room went and opened the door. Heh. Right … that works better! As I wrote earlier, I think I left my brain on the bus. I feel sorry for the person who finds it!
Tomorrow is our first 6:00 AM day. I think, though, with the upcoming excitement, it won’t be all that difficult to handle that.
Boa noite!
