Day 2 of our vacation started off late....as in, I didn't wake up until 10:15am!! I literally thought I had forgotten how to sleep that late, but was soooo glad my body remembered. We hopped up, went to have breakfast downstairs before they shut down the buffet, then headed out for our day...
We decided to take a trip up to the area near Porto where all the wineries are. Not that we could really go on the wine tasting tours (well, we could have, but wouldn't have been too much fun for me), but it was supposedly a nice drive and pretty country, according to Jerry. It's only after we set out that he tells me it's through pretty windy roads and he and a bunch of guys got lost the last time they tried to do this drive. Great....
Having me serve as navigator is a horrible idea since I'm doing good to get back and forth to work each day without incident, but I certainly couldn't drive since it was a stick shift. He wasn't kidding - the roads were VERY windy, and I definitely started feeling woozy about an hour into the drive. And we got lost. This is about the time we came up with our two mantras for the trip: 1) "We're getting there and 2)It's an adventure. Luckily we made it to Regua safe and sound after a few wrong turns and near misses of me almost having to hang my head out the window. Regua is a cute little town along the river Douro, so we just sort of wandered up and down the streets, found a place to have a bite to eat, and wandered some more.
Things got really interesting when we tried to go home. Jerry was trying to find the short cut back to the main highway to avoid all the twists and turns....well, we ended up on some teeny tiny roads that I was sure we were going to get into a head-on collision on through these tiny little "towns" if you can even call them that. One of the funniest things we saw was this little old lady shuffling along the side of the road chatting away on her cell phone. These towns didn't have any good signage for stupid Americans that got lost, but they had cell phone service??? After a few choice words on both our parts and driving alongside what we knew to be the main road we were looking for, we finally got to a point where we could actually get on said road and head back to Porto. I tried to get Jerry to just drive through the vines and undeveloped land just to get to the road faster, but I guess he was concerned about messing up the rental or something :)
When we got back to Porto we walked over the bridge that connects Porto to Villa de Gaia (where Jerry's actually staying). It was really beautiful as it was just at nighttime and everything was lit up. We went down by the river and had dinner at a great restaurant called Chez Lapin. It was recommended to Jerry by one of the Portuguese he works with (it was where he took his wife on their very first date). It was SO good. Jerry had the veal (which I'm not a huge fan of, but still tried and it was pretty good), and I had pork in a mustard sauce. Yummy! After dinner (which ended around 11 or so...these people eat LATE) we headed back to the hotel to get ready for the next day. We decided during the day that we were going to take the early train to Lisbon, knock around there all day, then board the hotel train for Madrid at 10:30pm. Little did we know what was waiting for us in Lisbon!!
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