Summer Visitors and a River Cruise on the Douro

We have been so fortunate to be able to share our expat lives with friends this year. In early September, Normal and Juan Rengel stayed with us in Cascais for a few days. We enjoyed good meals, including one at a restaurant called Moules & Gin. Some of you might recognize that "moules" is the translation for mussels. None of us tried any of their gin but we all enjoyed the mussels. We also had a tuk-tuk tour in Lisbon so that they could see all the sights. On that outing, I learned that the bouncing on the tuk-tuk added steps to my daily total on my fitness tracker. Cool.

We all took the train up to Porto, Portugal's second largest city. Will and I had been there before but it was fun to share it with friends and to see the sights again. We stayed at a wonderful hotel right on the river and took a tour of the city, this time in a van.

In the pictures below, the people in the street were spontaneously dancing to some salsa music coming from one of the shops. Summer fun. One of the train stations, Sao Bento, is famous for the tiles (azulejos) covering the walls. We hadn't been there before and it really was spectacular. We also had a stop at the Café Majestic which is famous in Porto and has a beautiful antique interior and good pastries.

Our next stop was to join a Gate 1 river cruise on the wonderful Douro. On this trip, we sailed during the day and were able to relax on the upper deck and take in the stunning scenery of mountains and terraced vineyards.

One of the cool things about this cruise was that we went through the two deepest locks in Europe. Actually, we went through each twice -- once on the way up and once on the way back.

Our trip included an excursion to the medieval, walled village of Castelo Rodrigo. On the way back we took in more of the breathtaking scenery of the Douro valley.

Our next excursion was to the city of Salamanca, Spain, known for its university and the characteristic mustard-colored limestone buildings. It is a lovely city and we all thoroughly enjoyed the visit.

We met a great couple from Oregon on the cruise and the six of us hung out together and laughed ourselves silly when we weren't solving the world's problems. We got a picture of us at our last dinner. I got a picture from our cabin of the last lock we went through. It shows you just how close those walls are.

Postscript on the Douro River Cruise: River cruising is a really great way to travel. Your hotel and restaurant floats right along with you. On the last day of our cruise, we took advantage of a great Gate 1 sale and booked a river cruise in the Netherlands and Belgium in April. Tulip time!

Another postcript: Unfortunately, both couples in the photo above came home with COVID. Amazingly, Will and I did not. We assume that we both have antibodies from our visit from Mr. COVID in July. Luckily, everyone has made a fairly quick recovery.

Once we returned from the north of Portugal, we were happy to welcome Niccole and Graeme Stewart, our neighbors in North Carolina, for a week here in Cascais. One of the first stops was a quaint Irish bar in town to enjoy a Sunday roast dinner. Graeme said that it was almost as good as his mum made when he was growing up in Wales. We had fun showing them around our beautiful seaside oasis. Chili enjoyed their very refined dog-walking skills. I did not take many pictures but I got a few when we visited Obidos and Sintra. We hated to see them go.