Spontaneous Sunday Day Trip

One of the weekly challenges we have is whether we try to get things done on the weekend, or get out to have some fun.  Often, it’s the get things done that wins out, with a bit of just plain old relaxing thrown in there. We’re planning on running into the Porto area next Friday (. . . . for the first time in, well at least a decade I’d say, that Ann is going to let anyone other than Art, or herself and then Art, touch her hair . . . .) so we were planning to stay in the area this weekend.  At Sunday breakfast though, I tossed out one of the ideas Ann had raised earlier in the week, and we made a half-day trip of it.  Where do you think we went?

I won’t drag it out.  We went to Guimarães for the day.  Guimarães is the first big town to the south of Braga.  By big, I mean big enough to have a football club that plays in the Portuguese Liga (the top professional league) and they were good enough to play in the UEFA Cup tournament this past year.  It’s also the home of the first King of Portugal, a fact of which they are proud of. 

Given that Portugal as a country was founded in the 1100s, it’s no surprise that King Afonso Henriques had a castle here.  It’s in pretty good shape too.

Ann and I walked around the castle, fascinated by how it simply built around some rather hefty stones on the site (and trying not to spurt out Monty Python and the Holy Grail Quotes in a bad French accent). 

But given the crowds of people wanting to get in, we decided to wait until later to actually try and visit it.  We’re still very much in that mode of simply looking around places to decide if we want to come back. This one is a definite on the come back to list.

Still, it was our first exploration of one of the many fortresses in Portugal and we were impressed.  A blog site we’d read, written by a self-avowed castle hunter, said he was stunned at how many there are in Portugal and said if you want to pack your castles into a short trip, you can’t beat the castle per density of Portugal.  I guess we’re going to find out!

After walking around the castle we walked down by a manor and then some churches and descended into the old town.

Oh, did I mention, their historic town center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Given the fact that I hadn’t done any scouting before we came in, and we drove in through some increasingly narrow streets finally to see that very welcome White “P” on a Blue sign that I immediately drove into to park (and that led us out right to the castle walls), we really had no idea where we were going.  So we just wandered.

And turned down whatever side street looked interesting. 

It was still surprisingly early, even though we’d gotten a relatively late start for us.  But Guimarães is only about 15 miles south of Braga and although we took the backroads down, it took us less than half an hour to get there.  Put another way, Ann almost drove that daily going to work back in Springfield-Eugene.

We’d brought our point-and-shoot cameras so as to have a bit more flexibility photography wise and just took our time wandering the streets.  We eventually got hungry and did a quick search for a good restaurant and only had to walk 150 meters to get to it (though it did take 4 roads and 3 turns to get there).

What I like about the restaurants on side streets, as opposed to the more popular squares that cater to tourists, is that the food seems more home-cooking like - if you can find the right place. We did this time. So I started with some clad verde soup . . .

And followed it up with a fantastic salmon - crisp on the outside and soft on the inside.

And I hate to admit it, but Ann and I devoured our dessert before I even thought of taking a photograph of it. My apologies!

After our great Portuguese lunch, we wandered our way back up-hill (towards the castle), stopping whenever an image caught our eye.

It was a rich texture of walls, pavement and light, and if you wanted it, plenty of people hanging out at the restaurants along the squares (which Ann and I naturally avoided whenever possible).

Did you notice my initials at the end of the street in the picture above?

We finally made it back to the parking garage and headed back home, again taking the back roads.

One of the things I need to condition myself to do, especially when we are taking these more casual drives, is to respond immediately to the brown signs with white letters.  They indicate a historic site.  On our first loop north, I saw a sign obviously for a site for some Celtic stones (they had a big image as well as the name of the site) that we really need to return to.  Well, on this trip there was a sign for a Roman Bridge we passed on the way down.  On the way back home, we stopped to photograph it.

Now, the bridge itself wasn’t much (like many of these ruins are), but it was real and interesting to think that Roman legionaries walked on it.  And while the sun was a bit too high for a nice photograph, it was worth taking one for the blog. 

Not only did we get to photograph it, I . . . well, quite by accident . . . wound up driving over it.  Now, it was a bridge that one could drive over, and others did after I did (and apparently before as well), but let’s just say that it’s sized more for a horse pulled cart than a modern car.

And how do I know that?  Well, our nice new Peugeot 3008 has near sensor warnings and right as I pulled into the mouth of the bridge, first the left bumper warning came on and then the right bumper warning came on and both were blaring the whole time I was crossing the bridge.  I stopped, then backed a bit, then moved forward a bit, then realized I couldn’t see where the sides of the bridge were.

Ann of course was not very pleased by this point.  So I rolled down the window and stuck my head out.  I figured that if I gave myself 2” on my side, the other side would be safe.  I say I figured, it was more like I hoped.

In any event, all is well that ends well.  Ann did tell me she was just waiting to hear the scratch of rock on paint so she could say, “Well, there’s your first scratch!”  I’m glad to say I disappointed her!

So, a walk around a castle, some wandering through a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an exciting drive over a Roman bridge.  Not bad for a spontaneous day trip!