Porto–Queluz–Sintra

Three hours and Eu30 took us along the super highway from Porto to the outskirts of Lisbon, where we turned off to visit the palace at Queluz.

The palace is quite grand and well furnished with period furniture, porcelain, glassware, silver, and other decorative items. It is probably the last Rococo palace built in Europe. 

The gardens were also very pretty and reminded me of the chateaux in the Loire Valley, which is probably not an accident, as the principle designer and architect of the palace was a Frenchman with the name of Robillon. One thing Queluz has that I did not see in the Loire Valley, was their own tiled canal

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The place is magnificent, but has seen better days. Restoration work is in progress.

From Queluz it was a fairly short drive to Sintra, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Up in the hills and with the influence of the sea, as well as shady trees, it was nice and cool. The town is and surrounding area is dotted with all sorts of palaces and stately homes.  Right in the heart of the town is a palace with very distinctive chimneys.

We stayed in a manor house which has been converted to a b&b. It was quite charming, with an exotic bird collection and only a short walk to the town center and the most important sights. After a short rest, we went into town and had dinner at a restaurant called Tulhas. The restaurant was fairly small simple and served very tasty food.  When you walk in the front door, the first thing you see is a manhole sized hole in the floor surrounded by a circular iron fence. This turns out to be a Moorish granary, which was discovered when the property was renovated to turn it into a restaurant. The restaurant’s name is taken from the Moorish term for such storage facilities.

After this it was time to get some sleep!

Port

The journey so far:

We are staying in a suburb of Porto, which is great, since we have free parking and our hotel is right next to the Porto Metro, so in about 10 minutes we were in the heart of the city for a Eu1 fare.

The main bridge that crosses the Douro river was built in 1886 by Gustav Eiffel’s assistant.  It is on two levels – the top level is for the Metro tram and has walkways.  The bottom level (which is connected to the quays) is for cars and pedestrians.

There happened to be a major Jet ski race going on, so all afternoon we saw the races from both sides of the river, as well as from the bridge above.

Porto is a nice town to walk and in most parts is very pretty.  There are beautiful azuelos (tilework) on many buildings, and those in the train station are especially noteworthy.

Many quarters have interesting shops, some with beautiful Beaux Art facades.  In places the city is run down with a number of disused buildings as well as lots of graffiti, but overall this is a pretty and interesting city to visit.

Yesterday was the Quintas where the grapes are grown and the production of port wine is started.  Today was the Port lodges where the wine is aged, bottled and shipped. Villa Nova de Gaia is home to most of these lodges and this on the far side of the river from Porto, where a rival port was established in the early 13th century after a squabble between the king and the bishop of Porto over shipping levies.

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Some lodges charge for tastings and tours, and some are free. Generally the free tastings are of a white port and a ruby port, the least expensive types, with the option to purchase tastes of other, more expensive kinds.  We ended up visiting three different lodges – Taylor’s (Taylor, Fladgate and Yeatman), Croft (now also owned by the Taylor group), and Weise and Krohn.  The latter was originally owned by Norwegians, but has bee owned by Portuguese since 1930 and is the last large shipper owned by the locals.  Taylors is very old –they began in 1692 and are the oldest to own their own Quintas (as opposed to just being shippers).

The lodges are where the port is aged and bottled.  Building on what we learned at the quintas, we found out more about the wine making process and how to select and drink port.

Almost all port with a specific year on the bottle is a vintage, which means that it should have spent a long time (20 years at a minimum) aging in its bottle,  It improves over time as long as you store it correctly.  But once you open the bottle it must be drunk within 2 days at most and so is really best suited for special occasions (or very heavy drinkers with deep pockets!)

LBV port will also improve with age in the bottle and can be consumed a little slower – within about 2 months max.

Tawny ports are aged in barrels for a long time, then put in bottles.   Tawnys are a blend of ports, with the average age of the wine used on its label, so a 10 year old Tawny may have 10, 3, and 13 year old wines mixed together (as an example).  10, 20, 30, and 40 year old Tawnys are available from most of the producers.  The bottle should be opened for drinking within a year or two of being bottled, but can keep for up to six months once opened.  The year of bottling should be shown on the back label.  So if you buy a good Tawny, check that the bottling date on the back label is within about 1 year of when you are purchasing, or else you are getting old stock.

A coheita is essentially a tawny port (i.e. it has been aged in barrels) from a single year, and it bottled just before it is sold. Whereas most tawny ports are sold as 10, 20 , 30 year old, etc., colheitas are sold by the year of making, the same as a vintage port.  But unlike a vintage, they do not need to be consumed in 1-2 days.  They keep for up to a few months.

Vintages are made with the best grapes from a single year (and even then, it will only happened about 2 or 3 times per decade) and are not blended, so the taste and character of the wine is mostly up to nature.  Tawnys are more a reflection of the winemaker’s art as they have more control by blending different wines.

Regular ruby port (sometimes sold as reserve) is a consistent blend and should taste the same year to year.

After getting a good education at Taylors, we were encouraged to try a 40 year old tawny, which was amazing!

Wiese and Krohn are known for their Coheitas and they were very nice in letting us taste a 1987 (the year we were married) colheita in addition to some of their white and tawny ports.  1987 was obviously a very good year for us, and doesn’t seem to have been too bad for port either – the wine we sampled had won two gold medals in prestigious wine competitions.

Northern Portugal reminds me of Ireland 25 years ago.  Here in Porto, Portugal’s 2nd city, there are lots of restaurants, but we only saw two ethnic ones – a Chinese and an Indian. By the way, to call someone a “Tripe eater” in Portuguese means they are a native of Porto.

The roads, with the exception of superhighways near Porto are much more basic and much poorer maintained than the Spansh roads.  The IP4, one of the main routes from Spain is a 2 lane highway, i.e. one lane each way, with an occasional passing lane.  In fact, at one point the road crosses a bridge that is only one car wide.  Since this route is used by heavy goods vehicles going to and from Spain, it is easy to find yourself stuck behind a slow moving truck.  At the same time, there is lots of road development going on.

Porto is a fun city to explore.  It is relatively compact, although it exists on a number of vertical levels, so you get a good workout moving as much vertically as horizontally.  But at least they have a funicular railway and cable car system if you would rather spend money than effort to move up and down!

What if you could go back in time?

At one of the port lodges, they told us that the next tour in English would be around 4:15.  Kelly said “but it is already 5 o’clock” to which the nice lady responded “no, it is only 4 right now”.  So we discovered that for the last few days we have been blissfully going around with our watches left on Spanish time, one hour later than London, and it turns out that Portugal is an hour earlier than Spain (same time as London).

The only thing I’ve ever had happen to me that is similar to this was when I went on a business trip to the middle of Alabama.  It worked out best for me to fly into Atlanta, Georgia, which keeps East coast time, then drive for a few hours to my destination Opelika, Alabama.  Actually, to give you an idea of how remote the location was, it was near Opelika.  “Near” somewhere you’ve never heard of is usually a pretty good indication that you are going to be in the boonies.  As I drove along the freeway from Atlanta and crossed west into Alabama, a sign noted that I was now in Central time (same as Austin, Texas) and thus I had effectively regained an hour in my day.

The place I was staying turned out to be a Marriott resort hotel on one of the Robert Trent Jones golf courses that are spread across the state.  The weather was beautiful, and the course looked tantalizing.  Although I had not come prepared to play golf, I had a fair amount of time on the day after I finished my work when I would return home, so I arranged to get an early tee time and rent some clubs.  The starter was unable to find a playing partner, so I enjoyed the round on my own and made extra good time.  I just hoped that I wouldn’t get a hole in one as there would be no one to witness it!

After I packed up and headed back to Atlanta for my return flioght, I congratulated myself on some good time management and actually being ahead of schedule.  About halfway through the drive, I suddenly saw the sign that I was now leaving Central time and was in Eastern time and thus had an hour less to get to the airport!  The Georgia State Troopers are famous for their strictness, so I am glad that I didn’t run into any as I put my foot down and rushed to Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport.  It all turned out okay and I made by flight home.  Luckily I was flying American Airlines, which has a small presence in Atlanta and thus did not have to go through the huge security lines in the Delta terminal.

Thinking about it on the plane ride home, I realized that in all my travels, this was the first time I had flown into one time zone in order to work in another.

Olive Trees and Vines

This morning we drove from Braganca to the Douro Valley, which is the principle area for making port.  They also make traditional wines here as well on wine estates called quintas.  We drove approx. 80 miles around the valley, which is very beautiful – green terraced fields along the steep river banks with the RIver Douro gleaming below.

The Douro Valley is field after field of grape vines and olive trees.  Almost every conceivable inch is set aside for the vines and trees in neat rows that create interesting patterns on the hillside.

In the end, we Visited 2 quintas. The first was Quinta do Teno, a small property owned by a French woman since 1997, which produces and sells their own wine.  The other is one of the the largest producers which has been in operation since 1790, Sandeman’s.  We stopped at their Quinta de Seixo, which is one of two main producing estates for them.

At Quinta do Teno we got to try several varieties of their and  port  and were only charged Eu 4 for the two of us, since we shared a glass.  They discussed how they make the port and showed us pictures of the process on their computer.  They still roll up their pants and stomp the grapes – 4 hours per day for the first 3 days after picking.

At Sandemans the Eu 5 per person fee included a tour, but unfortunately it was only in Portuguese at the time we were there, but we did get to see the actual production facilities and watch a movie about the process. They also provided tastes of two varieties of their port (for Eu15 you could try 5 different types).   Different kinds of port are made in different ways. All start with the harvested grapes being pressed in large concrete tubs.  At Quinta do Teno, this is done the traditional way, by foot.  At Quinta de Seixo, they have a mechanical system that emulates the same action.  This starts the fermentation, and the must (as the mixture is now called) is moved to a concrete tank where the fermentation process is stopped by adding grape spirits.  This keeps much of the natural grape sugar  from converting to alcohol, which is why port is so sweet.  At Quinta do Teno, they use French cognac and age the mixture for one year in the concrete tanks; at Sandemans they age the mixture for 6 months; afterwards the port is moved to an aging vessel, and this is where the different kinds of port take shape.  Tawny port is light brown in color and is aged in large barrels, which allows oxidation.  The older the port, the lighter it becomes.  Ruby port is not oxidized because it is aged in smaller barrels or bottles.

At the large producers (like Sandemans), as soon as the port is put into barrels, big or small, it is moved downriver to Porto to age in the warehouses there and then it is sent on for export.  At smaller Quintas like Quinta do Teno, they keep everything on site.

Another factor is whether or not the port is a vintage.  Essentially a committee gets together and decides if the harvest for the area is good enough to be declared a vintage, which happens about 3 years of every ten.  Otherwise the port is non-vintage.

So, various forms of port include:

Vintage: The star of a shipper’s range.  Made from grapes of a single year from the best vineyards.  Blended and bottled after two years in wood, it then should mature for a very long time.  Older producers offer 10, 20, 30, and 40 year vintages.

Late Bottled Vintage (LBV).  Wine of a single year, bottled between four and six years after harvest, i.e. it spends more time in the large wooden vessels.  Some LBV is offered filtered and does not therefore need to be decanted.

Tawny port without indication of age is aged (sometimes only briefly) in large wood barrels, and may be a blend of red and white ports.

Aged Tawny port is blended from top quality wines that be been aged in wood for a long time.  The older the wine, the paler, more delicate, less fruity and more expensive it is likely to be.

Ruby port is deep red and full of lively fruit flavor.  Aged for two or three years (sometimes in wood, sometimes not), it is less complex and less expensive than LBV or Vintage.

White port is made from white grapes and mainly drunk as an aperitif.

We headed on to Porto, which will be our stop for the next two nights.

Now I know where babies come from

We tried to drive to a place across the road from our hotel in the Bilbao suburb of Barakaldo to get breakfast, missed the entrance, drove around the building and ended up on the motorway, which subsequently took us miles out of the way before we got off and found ourselves well and truly lost.  We found a place and got some breakfast.  Two hours later we saw our original destination alongside the highway as we headed out of town.

Despite my previous post, we decided to avoid the toll roads today.  For one thing, it was only about 15 minutes longer on non-toll roads vs. the toll road for this route, and we wanted to be easily able to make stops.  As it turns out, the main roads were excellent and just about as fast as the motorways.  Once we got off the main highways, things slowed down a lot.

The drive from Bilbao to Braganca just over the border in Northeastern Portugal takes you though varied countryside. It begins with rugged costal scenery, which reminded me of Scotland or Northeastern Australia, followed by Basque alpine-like passes, then comes lush rolling hills, redolent of Ireland in the glorious summer. After a while the landscape switches to wide, flat corn and wheat fields, sort of like the American midwest (think Nebraska, just not as flat). Eventually, as we approached the Portuguese border we began to climb through hilly passes that reminded me of southern France. When I was 12 years old, I remember a family vacation to Haute Savoie in France and my Mum being very nervous as we drove through what she called, “road runner country” – roads with a mountain face on one side and a steep drop off on the other.

About half way through the journey, Kelly noticed large nests up in the electrical power lines and exclaimed, “Look – there are storks!” I presumed therefore this is where the baby factory must be. Since we didn’t see any human babies I have to presume the factory is currently idle.

The drive drom Bilbau to Braganca took about 6 hours overall. We had chosen Braganca as a convenient place to stop in order to explore the Douro valley the next day. As it turns out, Braganca. It  turned out to be a lovely walled town with a  12th century castle.  Our guide book states that the Rua dos Fornos just outside the walls was the Jewish quarter, but there was nothing really to see there.

Next to the castle was a porca, a pre-Roman pig statue, in this case with a pillory through it (probably a myuch later addition). Porcas can aapparently be found in a few towns in tis region of Portugal and were thought to be involved in fertility rituals.

We walked a little around the town and I noticed that almost all the doors seemed to be unique, of various colors, sizes and styles and in varying degrees of disrepair. I’m hoping that this might make an interesting photographic series.

We chose a restaurant recommended by our guidebook which is supposedly quite expensive for Portugal, but turned out to be moderate or even inexpensive compared to Spain. I was a bit disappointed that the dish I really wanted to try, pheasant with chestnut, is made with pork. So, we each had fish instead.

After we sat down, the server brought us home-baked crusty bread with the greenest colored olive oil we’ve ever seen. It had been flavored with a little bit of garlic and was incredibly delicious.

Portugal is of course a wine producing country, probably best known for its fortified wines, but it also produces a wide variety of traditional wine. We had half a carafe of their house white, which was very pleasant and it only cost us 3.50 euro. We could have had a full carafe for 4.50 euro.

Motoring in Europe

Driving in Europe is expensive.  There are no two ways about it.  So why hire a car?

Pros:

• Gives you the Independence to go where you want , when you want.
• Provides the ability to stay at properties not easily served by public transportation or taxis. If you are trying to save money, it allows you to stay at less expensive suburban or country hotels, which in itself makes a big difference in overall trip cost.
• Good quality highways.
• Reasonable car rental rates.  Esp. if pre-paid.  Watch out for hidden charges such as 2nd driver fees.   We ended up renting with Sixt and pre-paying the rental.  The big advantage was that with pre-payment, they included a 2nd driver at no cost, otherwise a 2nd driver charge was something like an extra 6 Euros per day, which adds up when you are renting for a lengthy period.
• Vehicles tend to me more fuel efficient. If you can,, request a diesel car.  The fuel is less expensive per liter, and the cars have much better mileage that petrol cars, so the overall fuel costs go down dramatically.

Cons:

• Driving trips can get expensive, inc, many unexpected costs:
  1. Petrol/gas.  At abbot $7-$9 per US gallon depending on the country you are in and what grade of Petrol you need.  In Spain, fuel is about 20% cheaper than Ireland. This all it makes $3/gallon gas seem very cheap!  With more fuel efficient cars, the gas cost per mile driven is a little better, more like 2x the US cost.
  2. Parking. Unless you are driving only in the countryside, you’ll probably have to pay for parking, which may be anything from reasonable to very expensive.  We made sure to pick up our car when we were ready to leave Barcelona since a car would be more of a liability within the city.  Parking costs there were about Euro 27 per day.  Even small towns may charge to park.  At Cadaques they charge about US 6 cents per minute.  How long until someone starts charging per second?  Also, most hotels in cities offer discounted, but not free parking.  You need to figure that you’ll be paying for a place for your car to sleep most nights as well!
  3. Highway tolls.  In driving about 400 miles from Barcelona to Cadaques, then Girona before heading to Zaragosa, we were charged more than Euro 40 in tolls.  You can plot routes to avoid the toll roads, but it will significantly slow your progress – Google maps estimates Zaragosa to Bilbao at about 2 hrs 54 mins via toll roads and just under 6 hours without them.  Driving off the toll roads is also much more tiring, although it does offer more options to stop to take pictures, etc.
  4. Insurance.  In most countries, if you reserve and pay for a car with a Visa credit card, they will cover the excess insurance (CDW) at no charge.  However in some countries (most notably, Ireland) this is not the case and so car rental can work out much more expensive than planned.
• Difficult to navigate.  At least we can read the road signs (more of a problem in places like China and Thailand where I let someone else do the driving!), but reading rapidly disappearing signs in  foreign language and interpreting them real time can be challenging.  Also, most Spanish city driving seems to be on one way streets and left turns are prohibited, so traditional map reading skills may not be as useful as they seem.  GPS is great, as long as it is accurate – we’ve found that Google Maps on my phone does a pretty good job, but sometimes prompts us to turn when we can’t.
  A word on GPS.  I’ve used the technology for several years.  My first GPS unit was a Garmin that Aaron now uses like a crutch anytime he drives anywhere.  I tried out several different makes units.  Leaving aside product features the most important thing on a GPS is the quality of their maps and navigation data.  It turns out that there are really only 2 major purveyors of GPS data.  So even in the US, the usefulness of a particular manufacturers' GPS unit varies greatly from city to city.  Of all the GPSs I tried, feature wise, I thought the Garmin was the poorest, but its navigation data accuracy was clearly the best for Austin.  I could have taken our Garmin with us to Europe, but would have had to purchase European maps for about $200+, which are only as accurate as the last update and as new roads get built and traffic restrictions brought in, becomes less and less accurate over time.  By contrast, Google Maps (which my phone uses) is constantly updated.  And it’s free – no need to purchase  Spanish or Portuguese maps.  It also means that all I need to pack is my phone, a micro USB cable and 12v USB adapter, nice and small!  Throw in a 3.5mm to 3.5mm straight through audio cable and you can use your phone as a jukebox with most modern cars since they will have an accessory input port (you may even be lucky and use BlueTooth, but this can be tricky to setup when the instructions are in a foreign language, and your rental car may not have BlueTooth anyway).
• Good public transport alternatives available.  If you are just going from city to city, you’ll have numerous options including bus, train, maybe even a high speed train option, and flights.  Used to be that flying was far and away the most expensive.  Now with low cost airlines, sometimes it is dramatically less expensive to fly than take the high speed train.  Go figure. Of course you have to get to and from the airports, but Spain seems to have very good public transport options for that.  When I checked in the AVE high speed train from Barcelona to Madrid, it was about 5x the cost of a cheap flight.

One more tip on saving some money when renting a car.  If you can, avoid renting at, or dropping off your car at an airport.  Airports have various fees that get tacked on to cars rented (and sometime returned) to airports.  For a few days, this may not matter, but for longer rentals, the difference can be huge. In the US, if you want to pick up in one city and return to another city, you almost certainly have to pick up and return to an airport, but in Europe, this is not the case, and in fact, may be more convenient if you plan to spend a few days in your arrival or departure city as you will probably find having a car a major liability in big cities.

So there you have it – just be sure before you rent a car in Europe that you know what you are getting yourself in for.

Bilbao

After leaving Zaragoza we drove to Bilbao, which took about 3 hours and brought us through some pretty Basque countryside that reminded me of Lichtenstein and the Austrian Alps.

We checked in to the hotel, dropped off laundry, had some lunch & headed into town.

A little known fact is that when J.R.R. Tolkien visited here, he found that the Basque people were a little shorter than average and deciding to honor his local host Mr. Baggins, chose to the most well known hobbit Bilbo Baggins.  Okay, I just made that up, but wouldn't it be cool if it were true?

Walking around the old quarter, the Casco Viejo, we found that almost everywhere was closed.  Places seem to close from 2 until 4:30 or 5, but most places seemed to be taking even longer to get reopened. We did come across a strange art installation, but what was more interesting to me that the art, was people’s reaction.

So we strolled along river to the Guggenheim Museum, then around to the Fine Arts Museum, which just so happened to be free today.  This museum covers art from the middle ages to today, but mostly includes classical art.

Finding a place open for dinner turned out to be a challenge.  Most   Restaurants don’t really open until around 9pm and instead people eat tapas at the local bars.  In the end, we were the first customers in an Italian restaurant at 8:30 and had a great dinner.

The following day we went back into town and as we walked towards our first stop, came across what appeared to be some kind of protest against the Swedish conglomerate ABB, but why most of the protesters were dressed as Roman Legionnaires, I have no idea.

Hoping to get a pastry and some coffee, we stopped at the Mercado de la Ribera, supposedly Europe’s largest covered market, although it didn’t seem all that big to me.  What did strike me was the it was bright, clean, and very modern, yet with all the typical fruit, fish, meat and other stalls that you might find in older, dingier markets elsewhere.  Plus of course, the gent in the Basque beret doing this grocery shopping.

We went first to the Basque Museum which had some interesting pieces, but everything was in Basque and Spanish, so it was difficult to decipher some of the artifacts.  We walked back to the Guggenheim where we spent several hours exploring the art and the building. 

The famous Frank Gehry building is amazing – a sinuous form of unusual materials that integrates itself into the location in a dramatic and meaningful manner. For instance, as Bilbao has a strong maritime tradition, the forms of the building bring to mind sails and fish.  Outside, between the building and the river is a shallow pond that seems to integrate the building with the river itself, and so on.

The artwork in the building ranges from unusual and provocative to odd.  Make that very, very odd.  While I enjoyed most of the art, some of the pieces were way off the deep end.  If I tell you that I do NOT include the Damien Hurst pieces in this category, perhaps you will understand.

We had dinner at the hotel tonight, which in most respects was not great, but since tonight is a local festival, they had a band of traditional Gallician musicians playing songs, which was fun.  Also a good reason to always have a camera with you!  As mine was up in the room, I snapped the image below with my cell phone.