Our Last Penne Epic Euro UK Adventures 2025 has finally commenced in Porto Portugal
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.
Our hike on the other side of the river for dinner and we checked out the Cathedral of St Francesco before we took off for Braga
