Portugal Trip – Day 4 – Porto
On Monday we had pre-booked a bicycle tour with Sportours. We were quite tired from all of our uphill travels and I certainly considered calling it off and staying in bed an extra hour or two. However Filipe had been so helpful planning our trip over email that I did not want to be rude and cancel. While I am not sure I would recommend bicycle in Porto in general if you do want a bicycle tour I do highly recommend Filipe and his team – their customer service was top notch from our initial email communications to accommodating last minute scheduling changes on our side.
Before bicycling we had a quick breakfast at the hotel buffet. Then we walked over to the Sportours office which was around the corner from our hotel. Miguel, our guide, quickly got us set up with our bikes and we were on our way. The group consisted of us and a group of four other tourists who were from Germany.
The tour is listed as “easy” on the website and only covered 3 miles over 3 hours. If this was easy I can’t imagine what hard would be! It felt like the tour was entirely uphill on the cobblestoned streets. I don’t think the beachcomber style bikes they provide are best suited for that kind of ride. On a positive note, we did see some great views from areas we never would have reached otherwise.
Pro-tip: Don’t try and bicycle in Portugal.
In addition to the views from the top of the city Miguel took as to a local market where we wandered around and saw meat curing, olives and garlic marinating and other local treats.
Towards the end of the ride we stopped at a cafe for eclairs and coffee which were delicious! At this point we said goodbye to Miguel and our new German friends to rush back to the hotel for checkout. The rest of the group was continuing on for another 30 minutes or so – I’m not sure I could have made it!
Once we checked out of the hotel we had 5 hours to kill before our train back to Lisbon. It would have been great to take a nap at this point but we were with no where to lay our heads.
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