The Douro River Cruise

Here are some photos of the beautiful Douro River and our cruise boat. The cruise included all meals for two days. For breakfast we had rolls and cafe or orange juice. For lunch you got soup and a bacalau (salt cod) with water and wine. Dinner was then more soup, a salad and a bacalau casserole with more water and wine. You always got a roll or two with every meal. Their rolls are very good, hard to resist. It also included the hotel for one night in Regua. Because we booked our tour online and they spelled my name wrong for my email, we never received documents and they were closed on Sunday and our tour started at 8am Monday. We got online and figured out the dock to go to and got onboard but from there on out, we knew nothing....no schedule for stops or meals or what hotel we were going to, etc. So the tour guide told us to stay onboard the ship when everyone else was getting off to the hotel. When they were pulling in the ramp to continue the boat ride (different tour package) we knew something was wrong and found another tour guide who said we were supposed to have gotten off the boat so they had to reload the ramps and off we went to find our hotel. Also, we didn't know what time or where dinner was to be or what time the to be at the boat the next morning...What a disaster (especially when the tour guides don't speak English) but we made it to all stops. The boat went all the way to the Spanish border town of Barca D'Alva. It was so windy there they were having a very hard time docking the ship. They only stayed there for about 10 minutes and then turned around going back the way we came. We finally disembarked in Pinhau and got on a bus to the train station. It was a very cool train ride back riding along the river banks. Since we didn't know what time the train was arriving in Porto, we went ahead and booked a hotel (thank God for our Vodafone internet pen). That worked out great since we arrived about 15 minutes after the last train left for Lisbon. All in all a great trip!

The middle section of this river is almost all vineyards and is definitely a much drier climate than Porto...must be good for grape growing. They didn't say one thing about the vineyards on the cruise which we thought was very peculiar. When they did come across the loud speaker it was to tell us about the architecture of the bridges and to inform us about the locks. We went through five locks altogether. One of them was over 100 feet high and was very intimidating to be enclosed in such high concrete walls all around you and knowing the pressure that was being put on the walls. I have included the photo of John a bit worried about that...