Quinta do Vallado, Douro Valley, Portugal

Tom was entirely responsible for this one. “It will be great,” he said. “It is elegant,” he said. “It will be relaxing.”

Oh wow was he right. (Screenshot that. You know why.)

The rental car pickup from Porto turned out not to be from the airport as I last mentioned but from the business district. I’ve mentioned before that we’re in the habit of picking up a SIM card for a local phone number wherever we travel. This one works for all of Europe. It really comes in handy for Uber. Not all cities play nice with the app, but we’ve learned that it can save a few Euro, and so we do it. Another complication this trip, though, is that the conventional “travel phone” – the old unlocked phone that we carry as extra – has stopped updating. The Uber app was not impressed. I’ve been moving the SIM card back and forth between the iPhone6 travel phone and my current iPhone7SE, which still updates and is also unlocked. After all that work, we took a taxi from the stand in front of the hotel. There were several waiting, and Porto was a city where the prices were much the same.

So much of travel is, “Well? Do you have any other option?” This time, nope.

Back to that driving. It really wasn’t bad. We were out of Porto without too much trouble and the highways are great because they are all toll roads. We had a toll tag in the car that will collect charges to the rental at the actual rate.

The river valley area where the grapes are grown for Portugal’s famous port is breathtaking. And while I can occasionally be one to exaggerate, this time we’re good. This land is steep and terraced and ancient. Many buildings, like the one we slept in, are 300 years old. You can feel the land, though. It’s an area where humans have flourished for a long time. There’a Celtic settlement not far away, but this time we didn’t go. Much of it was in a museum in the medieval town of Guimarães. While we lunched in that square, we didn’t visit the museum.

Quinta do Vallado is tucked into the second growing region of the Douro and a bit off to the side atop a tributary. The quinta does both wine and port. We had a tour of the winery as part of our stay and also a tasting. We’ve done a number of tastings over the years and this one was a top 5. (Ok. We’ve done a LOT of tours and tastings over the years.) Antonio, our guide in excellent English, was part of that. But the facility is really remarkable, and the tasting room is swish.

While there are rooms above the newly constructed restaurant and reception, we were housed in the lower lever of the old house. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Old buildings talk to me. They always have. That this one came with modern plumbing and an in-room mini fridge was great.

We had dinner at the hotel one night. They pair all of the courses with their wines and then a port to finish. The same dining room was used for wonderful breakfasts three mornings of our stay. I think the real winner of that part of the trip were the fresh mandarin oranges in our room and all the citrus you cared to eat from the property. The grapes were just unfurling their first leaves, but the trees were loaded with lemons, Meyer lemons, and several varieties of oranges. The nights we didn’t eat at the restaurant we enjoyed jamon and cheeses, bread, fruit, and wine in our room. Lunches were out, and I’ll get to those meals in another post.

As always, I’ll need to edit a few more photos and get back to you. We’ve moved. Flew to Bilbao a couple of nights ago and then another car rental to a forest in the Basque country of Spain a couple of hours from the French border. We are here for a blissful nine nights. A long stay in one location was how I was coaxed into this particular trip. The flights were planned before we knew that we’d be welcoming a new grand baby a couple of months ago. But we are getting it done. I’m cooking tonight and pleased for the opportunity. Laundry is hanging on a rack on the back patio.

More soon(er) or later.