Portugal
June 19, 2019
Richard Moore
Every time we traveled to Europe we would hear a familiar recommendation from the Europeans (guides and others), “go to Portugal”. So we finally took their advice and spent 3 wonderful weeks in Portugal and we can understand why the Europeans are crazy about Portugal. This is a collection of information concerning the trip, pictures, planning, lodging, food, wine, etc...
Photo Albums
If you just want to see the pictures from our trip here they are:
Some assorted shots from our days in Lisbon. We spent 3 nights in Lisbon to start our trip and ended the trip with 2 nights in Lisbon. Wonderful city and even with all our time in Lisbon we did not get to see everything. | |
We really enjoyed our time in Porto as it is a beautiful and accessible city, and could have used an extra day or two there. | |
Portugal Biking Days 1 and 2 Porto to Aveiro Some pictures of our first two days of biking from Porto to Aveiro along the Atlantic coast. Nice riding, our first day was an easy 15 miles and the second day was 43 miles with a ferry ride. | |
We spent two nights in Aveiro, known as the Venice of Portugal. I am glad we did as it is truly an amazing city with canals and lots of unique buildings and wonderful restaurants. | |
After a rest day in Aveiro we continued south on the Atlantic coast to our final destination of Pedro de Moel over three days. | |
We spent a night in the charming walled city of Obidos. A beautiful small town you can tour and walk around very easily. | |
We spent two days (not enough days) in Sintra. It is a Disney like place of palaces and castles. Despite clouds and rain/drizzle for part of our stay it was a beautiful and fun city. | |
We had viewed many YouTube videos of the Lagos area and it looked beautiful. It was even more spectacular than the videos revealed. The Algarve coastline is stunning, and the town of Lagos was fun with amazing restaurants. |
Planning
This trip was a spontaneous decision in January while we were in Arizona. One evening while enjoying some wine and watching TV we were discussing our late spring vacation plans and I noticed we could get some good airfares and flights on Delta so we booked some tickets. The next morning was when it sunk in that we were heading to Portugal for three weeks at the end of April. Over the next few months we read up on Portugal via the web and the Lonely Planet Portugal travel guide that was a free kindle book for prime members. The travel guide was nice, but almost too much information. Based on that and other website articles and YouTube videos we narrowed down our trip to include Lisbon, Porto, Algarve, Sintra, Obidos, and Aveiro.
We wanted to also include a bicycling tour in our trip and I started looking at self guided and guided tours. In the past we have used VBT for our European bicycle touring and they had a trip in Portugal but it did not look all that exciting to us. After our self guided experience on the Tour du Mont Blanc the previous fall we felt it was time to try a self guided bicycle trip. Looking at some more European based companies like MAC adventures and Camino Ways I noticed that their tours were supported by a local company, Portugal Nature Trails https://www.portugalnaturetrails.com/. I looked on the PNT website and they had a nice assortment of rides to pick from and we decided on their Easy Atlantic Way tour. We like to choose easier tours in the spring since we never know how much riding we will be able to do in preparation here in Minnesota where winters tend to hang on for a long time.
I contacted PNT via their website inquiry form and received a response in less than a day. Communications via email with PNT were very clear and timely. They had no problem setting up a custom itinerary for us that included extra nights in Porto and Aveiro along with adding nights after our riding in Obidos and Sintra. Instead of the shuttle to Lisbon at the end of bicycling part of our trip they arranged to shuttle us to Obidos. When we inquired about upgrading our rooms at all the hotels they were very prompt in getting us a quotation and we ended up upgrading the rooms, which was a nice treat and was not much of an additional cost. The only thing we did not take advantage of from PNT was a private shuttle from Obidos to Sintra since it cost 200 Euros and train would only be 30 Euros.
We decided on using trains in Portugal as much as possible and that worked our very well except when traveling on what they call Urban Trains. These are really subways and do not have any place to put luggage overhead, and they tend to be very well used by the Portuguese. The CP website (www.cp.pt) and app worked out nicely for travel. You can get first class seats for a few euros more if you book ahead of time.
For our hotel in the Algarve I looked on the PNT website to see what hotel they used in Lagos. It seemed that PNT picked some of the top hotels in every city and I figured I would trust them for our stay in Lagos. This turned out to be a good choice as all the hotels PNT used were very high quality.
We also like to do bicycle tours of the big cities we visit as we find them to be fun and you can cover more ground on a tour with less effort than a walking tour. The two tours we selected of Lisbon and Porto were:
Porto: BICLAS "c11 c5">https://tricla.pt/
Lisbon: Lisbon Bike Tour "c11 c5">http://www.lisbonbiketour.com/
Both tours were very good and recommended.
Accommodations (coming…)
Copyright 2019, Richard J. Moore
keywords: Travel, Portugal, Lisbon, Porto, Aveiro, Obidos, Sintra, Lagos, Biking, Hiking, Algarve
description: Assorted information and pictures from our wonderful three weeks in Portugal