Portugal

We started out by flying from Stuttgart to Barcelona to Porto.

The airport in Barcelona had several full-sized play areas for kids. It's almost as if some parent had a say in the design process.

We arrived in Porto and took a train down to our place. This ruin was next-door.

We walked down the street for dinner.

Hugo was on photo duty.

The kids wanted to go out and play by the river after they ate, which was fine.

The group headed back to the accommodation while dad and Jon went out to the only grocery store in the area open past 9 pm.

It was a nice walk.

In the morning we headed back out to explore the city.

Some of the old city walls are still there.

Areas near touristy areas are being rebuilt and refurbished at a furious pace. The city has constant construction noise.

For now, the old facades wait until it's profitable for someone to fix them back up. Portugal had many, many years of austerity and it shows.

Any country that prioritizes it can afford great public transit.

The Portuguese and the Dutch share an affinity for blue tile, among many other things. This church in Porto seemed like more of a tourist attraction than a functioning church.

European Catholic churches will always have the market cornered on creepy decor.

All of this can be quite stimulating for a four-year-old brain.

Car-free shopping streets should be common in every city.

This church also covered in blue tile, to great effect.

Throughout the country the cats were remarkably unfriendly and did not accept any tourist pets.

One of the things Porto is known for is elaborate bridges, and this is the one our airbnb was next to.

These Rabelo boats used to run barrels of Port and wine down the Douro river but now they are pretty much just floating advertisements. They were replaced by trains, but now the work is done mostly by truck.

We had a walk down to one of the many little market areas and they had all kinds of wine and cheese and seafood and spices for sale.

Checking alleys for muggers

Another day in Euro bathroom art

We got dumped on after dinner the second night but we all had our rain jackets like a bunch of PNW tech bros

Everyone went to bed early so it was time for a night bridge tour.

This old bridge was designed by the Eiffel firm, same as the tower.

Rented cars and visited Miramar Beach.

This amazing villa across from the beach was abandoned.

Kept going to our country house.

Drove out the next day for a remote mountainside hike only for grown ups.

We hiked through ever-shifting mists to finally get up close with massive windmills.

Stopped to check out some jugs on the way back.

Our villa wasn't perfect but it had beauty built in. It had many nooks and crannies. It had multiple curiously inaccessible parts. It had deficiencies and eccentricities. It was creaky and shadowy. It was hundreds of years old.

We walked down the hill to the river one evening. It had several ruins and an insane grade. The owner said he'd burned the clutches on two different vehicles trying to get up it at different times.

The villa garden was a trip highlight.

We had a river day where we started by driving to Regua, then took a train from there to Pinhao. The river bank had great cacti along it and it was one of the older trains where you could open the window and hang your head out.

We explored Pinhao for a while, had an excellent lunch, then boarded our boat to take us back down to Regua.

Pinhao is one of a dozen or so main wine towns on the Douro. The operate boats of there but also they have main road and rail access for moving things up and down the river.

We got on our boat back to Regua and immediately started making our happy faces. We passed many vineyards and some olive tree yards as well.

Some of the old regional river train stations were still there, but not in use.

We entered the lock with a much bigger boat. It dropped us a long ways and we sailed out the other side like nothing happened.

On the way back from Regua I stopped at a remote rest stop. We'd almost doubled the miles on the rental KIA at this point. It was up in the mountains and cold.

Drove through a town festival on the way home, all lit up.

Headed to Guimaraes to visit the town and castle but it ended up being an entire medieval festival weekend.

The 10th century castle was actually used for defensive purposes back in the day. Of course it was modified for tourism now.

On the way back we stopped at Fidalgo's works, an 18th Century attempt at building an especially ornate manor house. They must have run out of money.

The kids could easily have spent the entire time in the pool. No boats, no touring, no hiking, no restaurants. Just pool.

We headed along some trails to see an abandoned village but apparently the village is being rebuilt. The last reviews for the village in its abandoned state are getting pretty old. They built a direct road right down to the previously abandoned area.

After dipping toes in the river we stopped by the cafe on the hill. We ordered blind off the the menu and mostly got strange things we would probably not have ordered.

Back to Porto for some shopping before an airport hotel. One thing they do is colorful tins for seafood products.

Old cities blur the line between construction and archaeology. This looks like it might be a Roman sewer.

We walked around one block where it looked like the entire thing was vacant. It wouldn't be surprising if we came back and the façade was still more or less there but the entire thing was fancy apartments and stores.