I suppose it’s about time to dive back into a recap of our December, 2019 trip along the Douro River with Viking. (We explained in an earlier post why we’re calling this a trip and not a cruise.) Our last post from this trip was all about Port wine, with entries from Grahams in Porto, Sandemans at Quinta do Seixo, and the cooperative at Favaios. If we stuck with a strictly sequential recap of our trip, this post would be about Porto, but we visited this delightful city at the beginning and end of our trip so we’ll cover our time inPorto later on.
We left Porto on a bus instead of sailing on the Helgrim. It was a long, busy day with multiple stops. We started by visiting the Bread and Wine museum and the wine cooperative in Favaios (discussed in our last post), and then we traveled to the village center.
On the common there were several charming Nativity scenes created by various organizations, including scout troops, catechism classes, civil, and other religious groups:
From here we walked through the village to a nearby traditional Portuguese bakery where we sampled the traditional, local specialty “four corner” bread hot out of the oven. We were also able to pet the very cooperative shop cat:
So how does Viking wrap up a day of food- and wine-oriented tours? They took us for even more food and wine, of course, with a late lunch with entertainment, both from the restaurant and from the crew, including our program director, Oliver. The setting was a beautiful restaurant situated in the middle of a vineyard:
After this, we proceeded to our new ship, the Viking Hemming, where our suitcases were already waiting for us. Because we had already packed and unpacked so many times with all of our previous hotel changes and this ship swap, initially we hesitated about unpacking completely, but we eventually settled in and spread out in our new, same-as-the-old suite.
Next up: a visit to a medieval hill-top village and Flamenca dancing.
Halfway There Travelers 