Douro Driving Day
It’s already the end of July, which means it is time to say goodbye to Tabuado, Portugal, and continue on to our next destination: Oria, Spain. We are taking our time to get there over a few days since we aren’t due to arrive there until August 2.
After a morning spent packing up and saying our goodbyes, we stopped into the café for one final coffee date and treat. And a somewhat tearful goodbye with the lovely Sylvia and Nella who were working today. We then hopped in the car and began making our way to and through the Douro Valley. We are only a half-hour drive from there, so it didn’t take long to arrive in the area. We instantly knew we were there without the aid of any signage based solely on the stunning views!
We really had no set-in-stone plan for the day. We did have some vague ideas of places we would like to drive through, stop at, etc. While Jon is quite the planner and I agreed we could book our night for tomorrow in advance, I convinced him to just go with the flow for today. Go where we go, stop where we stop, sleep where we sleep. I kept the lucky penny on the dashboard and told him that we were going to continue to Trust The Penny!
We drove the twisty, turney, back-and-forth roads as we made our way along the mountains that were overlooking the gorgeous river. There were grape vineyards and olive trees as far as the eye could see on both sides of the river throughout this entire region. We have seen a lot of stunning things in Portugal and in our previous travels, but this is definitely in our top five now. Its beauty took our breath away.
We stopped at a couple of different wineries along the way. The lovely and industrious Pedro from our paddle boarding trip also does wine and river cruise tours through the Douro. His winery suggestions did not disappoint! At the first winery, Quinta do Tedo, we were getting pretty hungry and decided to eat in their restaurant. The food, wine, and views at this winery and delicious restaurant were amazing.
We continued on with our driving, enjoying the views along the way. We stopped at another winery, Quinto do Seixo suggested by Pedro. It was quite an adventure to get so high up the mountain in a manual vehicle with lots of twists and turns on an extremely narrow road in a country where they trust you to be a good enough driver that they don’t worry about you falling off the mountainside! We did make it up to the top, and the views and wine were well worth it!
While we were only half an hour away from the Douro Region, being in the Vinho Verde Region the wines are extremely different! Vinho Verde has almost exclusively white wines and the wines are almost all slightly carbonated/sparkling. Douro is known for its dry, red wines and port. While the wines were good in our area and you really do want a nice, refreshing glass of white or rose on a hot day rather than a nice, bold, dry red, we definitely prefer red wine as a general rule. These wines were so amazing, and we were sure to pick one up to bring with us to Oria.
We continued on with our travels, planning to hit one last winery. However, instead, we hit Pinhão and decided that a river cruise on the Douro River in a quaint, old-fashioned ship like the kind they traditionally used to transport the port wine grapes into Porto would be more fun. And it was! It was a peaceful and beautiful experience and let us experience the views from below rather than above. While a drastically different perspective, the views were just as stunning!
When we got back to land, it was already after 6 p.m. We thought we would stay in Pinhão, relax and rest a bit, grab some dinner, and spend the night here. We looked around town and looked at a couple of different accommodation options. But it did not seem like this was a great option for us. We decided to hop back in the car, continue driving for an hour, and then stop and see what was in the area and if we wanted to stay there for the night instead.
We ended up in Mirandela, a town that didn’t look like much when we got there. But it was almost 8 pm., and we found a basic-looking hotel that wanted to charge us $180/night instead of $750, and it came with free breakfast. We thought sure, let’s stop here. We set all our bags down in the room and headed out to explore.
Turned out we were in the middle of “downtown”. And while it was a Monday night, the Portuguese don’t seem to care what day or time it is here, they are happy to celebrate. There was a huge carnival just getting ready to start up. We walked across the road and found carnival rides and tons of food trucks. We grabbed some festival food and sat down to eat. It got dark shortly after we got there, and all the lights from the carnival really popped! We had a really hard time getting the girls to focus and decide what they wanted to eat, as they were too busy trying to decide what rides they wanted to go on and in what order!
The rides looked like a lot of fun! The girls were going to try multiple rides, but after trying the first one they fell in love and didn’t want to do any other rides but that one! It did look like a blast! They got to sit in cars and the cars each had a peddle. Each car was tethered to the centre on its own arm. As the ride was going, the kids could push the pedal in their car to go up or release it to go down. Katia liked to stay up high most of the time, but would sometimes swoop down and up. Emmeline liked to be all over the place! Sometimes down, sometimes up, she just seemed to love the transition and control to go where she wanted, while Katia loved the thrill of being up high!
We tempted them away from the rides by going to hunt down churros, which were delicious! And the first ones we have had so far on our trip. We were going to head right back to the hotel to get some sleep, but I saw pretty lights and got distracted and wanted to walk. So we crossed the bridge and found that the festival and pretty lit-up decorations extended all over the town! We walked through and looked at all the gimmicky stalls of stuff for sale, which was similar yet different to what you’d see at festivals back home. The food, drinks, people, lights, booths, etc along the river were just so pretty. One of the bridges over the river looked quite old, and a Google search confirmed it dated to the medieval era (Ponte Medieval de Mirandela). It’s still in use (we even walked across it) but has had a few repairs/retrofits over the years.
We finally did make it back to the hotel around 11 or 11:30 p.m., exhausted. I, unfortunately, could not sleep with the massive party happening outside our hotel that went on until about 3 a.m. (on a Monday! LOL), but who cares. There will be lots of time to catch up on sleep. Today was a day full of amazing and surprising adventures and stops as we trusted the penny to lead us in the right direction. Thankfully, that penny’s luck had not run out yet, and we had a truly amazing day!