These were the days to just be tourists, and Porto is both fascinating and facile for bipeds.  Like many places here, the concept of road grading eluded the ancients and thereafter was considered unnecessary and certainly destructive by successive generations.  Also, cobbles are forever, unlike much US roadwork.  Thus, from our well-placed riverside hotel, we went up.

The first afternoon,  rode the funiculare from Riverside to the main town area and down to the shopping neighborhood that features one-of-everything stores of international designers and enough shoppers to completely fill this vehicle free section.  We, however, were most fascinated by the viewing window into the making of the national pastry, pastel de nata.  Of course, even keto people have to share just one.  

One of our favorite tourist attractions was the Livrario Lello, a longtime intellectual hangout and current stuffed neogothic bookstore. One has to stand in line, pay a small entrance fee and ditch your backpack just for a look.  It is said that much of the Harry Potter series were written in this place by JK Rowling, and it even has a certain Hogwarts feel to it.

The little shops all had very welcoming clerks.  Many were still very enamored of the US,  but puzzled and alarmed by the recent turn in our national politics.  Rap lives everywhere on phones.  This young shopkeeper had a number of favorites, including Bow Wow, Stitches and Eminem.  She played us clips, opined on the true character of the artists and gave us a fairly bewildering quick education, all delivered in perfectly delightful English.

Naturally, we had to do the river bridge tour which produced lots of great photo ops.Our last night’s dinner was in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant Cantinho do Avillez owned by a famous Portuguese chef, José Avillez.  This chef also has a restaurant in Lisbon, so when we looked up directions with “maps” travel time was something like 6 hours.  The dinner, in spite of modest surroundings, was wonderful with yet another bottle of Vinho Verde, but no Porto.  The fried green beans and roasted octopus were especially memorable.

Then, off to a 3 hour sleep before the long disrupted trip home.  We sat 2 hours on the tarmac in Porto, thus missed our Seattle connecting flight in Frankfurt.  We were rerouted to San Francisco later that day on a longer flight that probably flew right over our house.  Then, the obligate one hour delay in SF…finally home!  We have decided to stop deluding ourselves about our Lufthansa allergy.

We will always cherish this adventure for the great organic, earthy feel of the country,  the warmth of the people, the seamless melding of old and new, the uniform pride in country that the Portuguese people have, our idyllic rides past castles, through cork forests and olive groves and, of course, the cobblestones.

Well, this was a first!  On Saturday, we appeared at the airport relaxed, well-packed and with plenty of time, no need for shooting bullets backwards over the shoulder.  We arrived at Luftansa check-in, only to be summarily turned away because Moss’s passport had only 75 days until expiration rather than the (Eu-required) 90 days until expiration.  This was, of course, an unexpected hard stop.

Luckily, our good friend David, was still around to retrieve us and the Saturday goose chase began.  The four of us (Moss, David, me and Wayzie) toured much of south Seattle from the travel agent office (closed) to the federal building with the passport office (closed) before giving up and dragging home :(.  The next two days we spent as if sitting at the airport, only luckily, we were able to do it at home.

Second try on Monday:  left home, packed, but with no passport and no flight tickets.  Once again, David was our personal chauffer

We regretted having to leave the very comfortable bed, lovely setting and great food at our Pousada, an ancient convent beautifully converted into a hotel, in Belmonte.  It was so personalized that our room had a name (Frei Pedro), rather than a number. This stop included our first encounter with vinho verde (a young wine from a particular region of Portugal) which we loved (right, Jeremy?).  We easily finished the whole bottle.

On Saturday morning, we had a schedule to keep.  We had our assignment:  get to Muxagata by 11:30am.  But first, we had  a stop in Transoco to see a castle with a documented construction history and documented renovations by Moors and Christians from the 10th through the 18th centuries. It also had vibrant ancient Jewish community with remnants still extant, including the rabbi’s house.

Muxagata is such a small town that the Apple map function tried to send us to a different village more than 120K away.  Nontheless, we managed to arrive in the correct town.  All ten of the  streets were just wide enough for a car, and about 20% steep up or down.  We were expecting a jeep transport to a winery, but we were both wondered if we were nuts to leave our rental car and head off into the wilds over an 8K completely uninhabited dirt road.  Our driver, Francisco, looked rugged, could smile, but could not speak any English.  We will surely be murdered… no, that’s crazy.  Eventually, after passing several hikers, we reached the Ervamoira winery.  We were greeted by the most solicitous hostess who invited us to enjoy the silence (with an apertif of  two  kinds of port) after viewing the surprisingly extensive museum describing the origin of the winery.  This winery nearly disappeared due to a planned dam which would have flooded the entire property.  It was saved by the discovery of cave-like drawings on rock and a very fertile archeological site with artifacts dating back to 10,000-15,000 BCE.  It continues to yield new discoveries and research data, all described in the museum.

Our lunch was modest but magical, enjoyed, along with some fly-buddies and a Portuguese birthday party, atop a veranda looking out over the fields.  The total count of wines: 7 ports (white and red) and one regular red wine:  1.  No need to describe the bone rattling trip back to Muxagata. We drank so much wine that we went to our next lodging, the historic walled town of Marialva, and immediately took a nap!

We were 2 of only 4 guests at this Pousada at the base of the castle wall, as near as we could tell. The dinner hour saw us nearly recovered from our afternoon indulgence, only to be set upon by too-generous unsolicited wine pours–twice in one day.

The following morning the power went off.  Already,  we  had no cell service.  Then no internet.  Breakfast was quite nice, but it was clearly very smokey.  The innkeeper assured us the overnight spontaneous fires were more than 45K away.  The car was covered with a slurry of rain-borne ash.  We drove away and right through enough smoke to nearly blot out the sun on our way to Porto.  We saw nothing more than a few yards  from the road. Needless to say, the recent California fires and the associated disasters were heavy on our minds.

A few wrong turns and re-routings, a parking place a quarter mile away, and we have landed in Porto.

On Thursday afternoon we tramped over a dusty path just before sunset to the nearby horse arena for an impromptu demonstration of Portuguese horsemanship, mainly dressage seat.  These Lusitanian horses do not begin training until the age of 5 or even 6, and are treated with the utmost gentleness at all times.  They eventually respond almost exclusively to voice.  We saw long-rein lunging and some kiddy vaulting, even by the guest child riders.  Lemonade and nuts were served to the spontaneous audience, followed by an extended dinner visit with our fellow travelers from Germany.

Friday on the freeway was shared with truckloads of raw cork.  We navigated quite successfully to Tamor, a disney-like city with the most extensive non-royal castle we have seen.  Its  endless rooms, churches and gardens were built over many successive occupations, beginning in the 13th and up to the 20th century.  This made for a walk of nearly 4 miles by the time we returned to our hotel.  Also, this is a city which appears to be particularly hospitable to cats who are everywhere.

If you have been reading along with us, you remember that this is the 100th anniversary of Fatima (nice rundown on Wiki if you don’t know what that is), and Tamor is very close to Fatima.  This meant that we were sharing lodging and, of course, the dinner hour with at least 300 pilgrims from many nations.  It is a sight to behold:  slightly inebriated pilgrims at dinner singing at the tops of their very-uplifted lungs.  We had to navigate around several tour buses early in the morning to continue our adventure.

Our next stop was Monsanto, a small town high in the mountains distinguished as the “most Portuguese” of villages (we suspect the office of tourism sprinkles this designation around from year to year).  This quirky little hamlet is characterized by 20%-grade cobbled lanes and houses built right into and around huge boulders, some of which form walls or even roofs of these historic dwellings.  Parking in such places is limited and slightly competitive, but we were glad to not be on bikes.

Today’s longer tour, however, was in Belmonte, another somewhat remote hilltop town with the obligate castle/fortress.  Just like the rest of the Iberian penninsula, Portugal sustained an Inquisition in the 14th century, although the heart of the King wasn’t really in it.  Some expulsion, but more  “encouraged” conversion (without a lot of bloodshed) resulted in far more numerous crypto-Jews.  In this town, the women preserved a secret oral Jewish tradition with no texts for more than 500 years.  They maintained secret cupboards in all their houses to keep Jewish artifacts like candles for Shabbat.  They had secret midnight Easter services in their homes with white garments and the making of matzoh in distant memory of passover.  They extensively intermarried to keep the traditions alive, and appear to have suffered no ill genetic consequences for this.  Jews were officially re-welcomed in the 1800s, but the Belmonte Jews stayed secret until the 1950s when they were rediscovered and welcomed back into the larger tribe.  Benefactors have built a synagogue and there is a new museum.  As this Orthodox enclave has had more contact with other Jews, the younger members have become consumed with making Aliyah, returning to Israel,  resulting in the decline of the community’s at an alarming rate.  There are now just 50 members, from a recent estimate in our guidebooks of 300.  The youngest child is now 5 and there has not been a Bar Mitzvah for 5 years (no Bat Mitzvot here, of course).  There appears to be no anti-Semitism here.  At Channukah, the large Menorah in the center of town is lit jointly by the Rabbi and the parish Priest, following which jelly doughnuts (sufganyot) are enjoyed by all.

Apologies to our readers.  We have several pix we were hoping to show, but they don’t seem to want to “stick” to this post.  The internet connection here is unguarded by password, but notoriously slow away from large metropolitan areas.

Our final day of cycling began with a pre-dawn breakfast and 7:45 departure, anticipating the heat, and what turned out to be a little over 60 miles and about 2600 feet of climbing.  The early roads were civilized “N” roads with little traffic, good grading and wide shoulders, giving way, initially,  to ungraded single lane roads with mildly aged pavement, but with endless steep, short climbs that Portuguese riders call by a term which roughly translates “leg breakers”.  Further on, however, the pavement worsened steadily, until the only partially smooth section was the 8 inches on either side of the white line.  These roads were winding, but infrequently travelled, thus leading to the game of car chicken.  In this game, you are completely dependent on your hearing to identify oncoming traffic.  When you hear the approach (from behind or ahead) you move temporarily to the side.  Luckily, we’ve not seen any of the more silent electric cars here.  

We had gotten quite good at car chicken and were descending  the rollers at our usual >25mph speed.  Then, Moss hit a bad patch of pavement and the Garmin (which was our sole source of navigation) flipped off the bike at the same speed, and into the bushes.  We spent 20 minutes searching in the heat before we found the little gem, no worse the wear, thanks god.  We were happily able to complete the day’s ride and even had a “health check” visit from Jose (which we passed).

About half of the climbing occurred in the final 25% of the miles with temperatures  around 92-3,   somewhat challenging for us oldsters.   Thus ended our 310 mile bike journey across the width, and some of the length, of this beautiful, peaceful and evidently happy country.

We were very glad when the final short climb led to Naturarte, a low-key quaint inn with home style cooking, a wonderful innkeeper, Anna,  and an equestrian center.  We met a very nice German family.  Peter, the dad, had been  a high school exchange student at Edmonds- Woodway.  His wife Andrea had worked for a New York company.  Their 7 year old daughter, Hannah,  loves horses, has been taking lessons each day,  and participating in an informal horse show (mostly Iberian dressage) which was wonderful to watch.

We spent our rest day touring around the coastal town Villa Nova de Milfontes and further north, including lunch with a shy but vocal parrot.  We now just need to repack to begin the car portion of the  Portuguese adventure.

Moss learned this when he was diligently shopping for quality meats.  He had decided that beef should only be grassfed.  We don’t buy pork often, but he wanted to avoid feed lot pork, so asked the butcher if he had any grassfed pork.  The deadpan reply was “pigs don’t eat grass”–wiltingly embarrassing!  But in Portugal, pigs eat acorns!  And the meat is justifiably praised by all.  We had braised black pork last night, preceded and accompanied by two of the best wines thusfar, both estate raised at Sobroso.  Our dinner host was Tiago, a young man who is genuinely in religious awe of the vintners’ trade and clearly in love with his employer’s whole operation.  This is probably our favorite inn so far.Our ride out was on gravel at 7:45, just barely after the sun was up.  We were anticipating a longish day (58 miles) with a few thousand feet of climbing and hoped to get most of it done by the time it got really hot.  Luckily, that mostly worked out and the riding was just terrific with a whole smorgasbord of pavement variations, but almost entirely on backroads with limited traffic.It was a big day for animals, with cows, pigs, sheep,horses and goats all spotted in the same 2 mile stretch.  Even the sheep have enough sense to get out of the heat.

Our lunch was a cheese sandwich made from breakfast leftovers.

The lodging tonight was reached by, unimaginably, an even longer gravel driveway of about 2 miles, culminating in a steep and deep little ramp up to the parking lot which finally dumped me off my bike.  I’m happy to report that we continue injury-free.

We had a jeep tour of the vineyard, a tour of the winery, a brief tasting of some of the wines followed by a very slick promotional movie about the 2 brothers who started this business with funds from the family merchandising in the Algarve (southern/mediterranean region of Portugal).  We then had an opportunity to buy, but what we probably needed more was an opportunity to sleep–that comes later. This is a much more corporate experience than last night, but all still good.

Tomorrow is our last riding day,

Last night’s lodgings were wonderfully casual, although we were careful not to order venison with this guy looking over our shoulder:We departed early again, after begging entrance to breakfast at the unimaginable hour of 7am.  It was a challenging start with a 1 mile rough gravel driveway followed by an 8% drag up to Monsarraz, a classic hilltop fortification once attacked by an English lord after a broken betrothal to a royal daughter.  This is notable because England and Portugal have a long history of a friendly alliance.  This would have been a fun place to defend, absent trebouchet or heavy artillery.

Bullfights now occur in the main gathering area.  We know this from guide books and because there were modern beer dispensaries in the ring.

This was a 42 mile day with a bit of a sting in the end.  Here is the profile we anticipated:

We should have been a little suspicious due to the absence of the Monsarraz climb.  Just as the day begain to get really hot, we hit a series of 200 ft steep climbs and descents followed by the inevitable gravel driveway.  This photo shows how dry things have gotten here:It was a good day for animals.  We passed this steer with 3 babies–daddy day care?  Steer training?And we have not yet seen the bird who nests here but are keeping our eyes turned upward.Happily, there is still enough water for

I was hoping to get a few food pics to add, but, unfortunately, the food kept disappearing faster than either of us could shoot.  Here is the dining room anyway.  Cave-like and cool–perfect!All subsequent pictures of me will be curly since I fried my straightener on the 220 outlet.  Just because you CAN plug it in doesn’t mean you SHOULD plug it in.  Moss is so happy to be carrying the heavy transformer for nothing now.

The night was a display of warp-speed domestic evolution with a wedding followed by a heated domestic argument (different couple, we think) well in to the wee hours.  Nevertheless, in fear of the heat we were out and riding around 8:30 after a large breakfast including many otherwise forbidden items.

The riding today was spectacular, mostly along uninhabited country roads which were generally well-paved, except for several 20 foot sections of no-pavement, just to keep us paying attention.  We leapfrogged with balloon chasers waiting for their clients to descend,and also came along several of these peculiarly Portuguese installations which usually appear just before a town entrance:High school Spanish gets you the function, but how it works is unique.  These signs appear about 500m before a stoplight which guards no intersection, just out there.  There is a speed sensor just at or after the sign.  If you are going over the speed limit (the usual), the light turns red in front of you and stays that way for 2 minutes–tough on the law-abiding driver behind you also.

The terrain today was more open with endless brown rolling hills as the agriculture changed from mostly cork with some olives to mostly olives, then on to vineyards and cattle.  Our accommodations tonight are at a very Iberian-looking large farm installation which has morphed into a beautiful inn while still maintaining hectares of vines and olive trees.  Wine and olive oil tasting are on the before-dinner menu for tonight, and tomorrow we will ride into the hilltop town just a few kilometers away which, like many towns, had a Jewish section prior to the Inquisition.

It is the rest day in Ėvora (usual for Americans to miss the accent and thereby mispronounce).  We both awoke glad to be not-riding in another scorcher.  Our scout leader, Jose, picked us up after a sumptuous and carb-tempting breakfast which we reached by walking down four long hallways totaling a quarter mile before coffee.  You can see one of them behind Moss sitting in a swing chair, undoubtedly left over from the nuns.  Everything in the rooms is high tech and hemi-green.  The toilet/bidet is an unlikely futuristic machine with shower controls, and the air conditioning will not turn on if the patio door is unlocked.

In Ėvora we Rick Steves toured the old city which has Roman walls and utilites (see aqueduct), Moorish, Christian and modern art and architecture, including some early 21st century works which may be unearthed and restored by future generations.  A large blue window shrine commemorates the city’s gratitude to God from being spared in the 1755 earthquake that leveled Lisbon.  Most doorways and lintels here are colored. We learned that blue repels flies and yellow repels evil spirits–take your pick.  Also, the dead travel in high style here.

We had an extended conversation in English with a cheery shopkeeper who taught us all about the magic properties of cork, its many uses including space capsules, surfboards, helmets  and wearing apparel.  As things warmed up, we learned about and then saw the 2 story steep marble staircase to his upstairs home. He encourages his 75 year old mom to go up and down several times a day for health, but allowed she was probably napping since it was midday (siesta still a good idea also, apparently).  The shopkeeper and later a pharmacist attributed their excellent command of English to American movies and video games.  I, of course had to buy a cork handbag from Hugo, the shopkeeper.  We expect he’ll be visiting us in Seattle sometime in the next year or two.  A biker from Minnesota noticed Moss’ Portugal Bike Tour backpack.  This later resulted in introducing him to Jose who had come to retrieve us–Yay! another customer.

We haven’t sent any foodporn yet, but not because of culinary mediocrity.  Our dinners last night (tuna, veal, pork, strawberry tartare and chocolate) were excellent and will undoubtedly be reprised tonight.  Lettuce appears to be a rare commodity in short supply; the Portuguese wines are all very unique and interesting with very little fruit, lots of tannin (in the reds) and many hints of unusual herbaceous and even licorice undertones.