Maps and Cobblestone Streets Don't Mix

Day 2: Getting to Porto

Kim and I made it safely to Madrid, then successfully navigated to our last flight to Porto. When we finally arrived in Porto, we were weary from traveling and ready to lay down (and by lay down I don't mean partially extend our legs onto an adjoining airplane seat...I mean LAY DOWN as in full horizontal extension onto a bed with a pillow bigger than a shoebox). So, we headed via tram over to the Budget car rental place where Jon Stewart's doppleganger promptly assisted us with our reservation. He also assisted Kim with her GPS that wasn't able to pick up a satellite by telling her that we needed to get a few kilometers from the airport before it would work. Thus, we set off in our little car with a very basic map provided by Budget, in the general direction of our hotel.

If you weren't already familiar, I strong-armed Kim into letting us stay at a hotel that is a castle...yes, an actual castle. It is the Castelo Santa Catarina and it looked beautiful in the pictures we saw online. I was super excited to stay there. I mean, how often can you say you stayed in a castle, right?

So there we were driving away from the airport and towards the hotel and still no GPS. We pulled over to give the Garmin a chance to catch up to us and waited several minutes....still no GPS. OK...I guess we are on our own with our Budget map.

We eventually find the downtown area of Porto where we are staying. YAY! We are in the clear! Or so we think...

Fast forward to 2 1/2 hours later when we finally find our hotel and check in. As it turns out we had a few things stacked against us:
1. Porto is notoriously terrible for getting around by car
2. We had the world's worst map (think the kind you get when you are walking around the zoo and that is basically what we had)
3. It is exceptionally hard to read a map when you are driving down cobblestone streets (it is the equivalent of reading something while you are peddling a bicycle down a mountain trail), and
4. Our castle is on a street that is partially non-accessible by car

Needless to say, by the time we checked in we were REALLY ready to lie down. When we checked in, the boy at the reception desk (yes I said boy...I would be surprised if he was a day over 16) showed us up to our room on he 3rd floor. ***TRAVEL TIP: one thing to note if you are going to Europe and staying in an older hotel, it is quite likely to not have an elevator. So after we head up to the 3rd floor (which is actually the 4th floor because the main floor is the ground floor), we see a quaint little room with one double bed in it.  Whaaaaaaaaat?

As it turns out, there was a mix up and it wasn't clear that we were requesting a room with two twins in it. Since I am pretty sure Kim didn't want her first night of sleep in 2 days to be with me spooning her, we had to request another room. The only one available is in the adjoined building and not in the main castle. We took it and were quite relieved to see it was on the 1st, or rather the ground, floor. We carried our suitcases up, and then realized we had a second wind, so we decided to explore Porto a bit. 

We walked down to the Mercado Do Bolhao (local market area) and looked at some of the stuff the street vendors were selling, then continued walking the mile or so down to the Duoro River where we walked over the famous Ponte de D Luis bridge and over to the area where all the Port wine cellars are. Since most of the cellars close by 6pm and we were already getting pooped, we decided to save that for the next day and instead walked back across the bridge and found ourselves a cute little restaurant to have dinner in.

By this time we were really hitting a wall. I am surprised we even made it for the main course, which for me was octopus fillets with octopus rice ( perhaps a local favorite? I have seen it on several menus...) and for Kim was a shrimp dish. Poor Kim was so tired, though, that she had forgotten that here they serve the shrimp whole...meaning eyes, legs, shells and all. We made it through all right, took a cab back to our castle and promptly fell asleep. Kim's head didn't even hit the pillow before she was out like a light, and I soon after her. All in all, it was a good first day of being on land again and quite an adventure...right down to the TJ taxi cab ride we had home. Woo-hoo!