Our Last Penne Epic Euro UK Adventures 2025 has finally commenced.

We flew to London on Wednesday morning and arrived in Heathrow at about 6 AM. We were too nervous to take a bus to a different airport to get a direct flight, so we flew to Porto by way of Barcelona and made it an extra long grueling travel day and arrived at our hotel around 5:30 PM. We hit the ground running since the Willems arrived at about 2 PM and were waiting for us.

Our beautiful hotel, OCA Ribeira, is a stones throw away from the Douro River and we had a wonderful dinner after having a celebratory arrival aperol spritz.

We woke up early today and headed out to the Douro Valley for a Porto wine tour. It took about 90 mins by bus and our first stop was a vineyard in Sabrosa where Ferdinau de Magalhaos (Magellan the famous explorer) is from. After a fun tour with a very informative and entertaining guide named Rita, we had a delicious lunch at the vinum, we had a short boat cruise on the river in the town of

We got back to our hotel with just enough time to change and the walk across the river for a fabulous dinner at Graham bottle house overlooking the Porto waterfront. We ended up walking back and the torrential rains began about 3/4 of the way.

We have not had a lot of time for jet lag lol.