Tuesday, June 28, 2022
We got up early and drove just under two hours to Porto, a city I was very excited about. According to many sites, it is loaded with interesting things to see and one of the best places to visit in Portugal.
However, once we got to the city, it took us almost two hours to get to our hotel because of construction in the area. We called the hotel twice for advice for how to get there because our GPS kept sending us to the construction zone and blocked streets. When we finally found a way around the mess, we had to park our car several blocks from the hotel in a parking garage.
The street on the left (as seen from our hotel room) is the way GPS really wanted us to access the hotel, but the street on the right is the way we were finally able to come in. It was blocked off to cars, but they let us in to unload and then sent us away to park.
And then Bob forgot to grab his camera, and I left my sweater, and we our nerves were already frayed by the driving, and both of us were unhappy.
The huge delay meant that we got to the first place on our list 2.5 hours behind schedule, and it felt like we were playing catch-up all day, speeding from venue to venue. It was a great disappointment for me. Porto is a city where "meandering" would be fun. We did very little of that.
However, the very first place we took a look at was NOT on the schedule--the São Bento (St. Benedict) Train Station, built in the early 1900s. About 20,000 exquisite azulejos cover the walls and are topped by a border of polychromatic tiles. Together they tell the story of Portugal's past.
