Abados, Bussaco Forest and Porto

Today after a nice breakfast we took off to Porto. The country side along the Western cost of Portugal is absolutely beautiful! We drove for about 1 hour where we stopped in a small town of Obidos. This town has been handed down as a dowry from Queen to Queen throughout the rein of royalty in Portugal. It’s a small beautiful little town where we picked up some pottery and some cherry liquor. The idea with this cherry liquor is you pour it into a small chocolate cup when you are finished with the liquor you eat the cup. It’s fantastic! Anyway after Obidos we stopped for lunch in another small town along the way and had suckling pig. It was fantastic! We had some sparkling wine whit the meal and we decided to buy 6 bottles (2 each of White, Red and Pink) of this sparkling since it was good and very inexpensive. After lunch we headed for the Bussaco Forest. Here we found one of the most beautiful Palaces I have ever seen. It is now a hotel so we are planning another trip to stay in this hotel but that will be another story a few years from now.  This palace was once one of the palaces for the queen. You can stay in her room I’m sure for a hefty price. While we were here we wondered the grounds and had tea in the lounge. If you want to see more here is the website www.lusohotelbussacopalace.com. Next we arrived in Porto. We found the apartments we are staying in. They are situated on a cliff behind a cathedral and a palace. The house was built in the late 1600’s and has an incredible panoramic view of all of the port houses in Casa Da Gaia which is the town across the river. Once we settled down in our apartments we decided to go have dinner. It was late at night and we asked the owner for some recommendations for dinner. He recommended a restaurant that was about ½ a mile away. So we started walking… Well unbeknown to us we were walking through some very bad parts of town late at night. We were told later that we were lucky that this part of town was full of bad people and drug addicts. Well Anne was saying se really did not like the area it was I guess giving her bad vibes. Anyway we survived and had a pleasant dinner. By the way we walked home a different way. By the time we got home it was very late so we called it a night.

 Walled town of Obidos.

Streets of Obidos.

Eating suckling pig in a small town on the way to Porto.

Our apartment in Porto. (White building to the right of the big palace on the hill).

View from our apartment window at sunset.