Rick Steves'
Heart of Portugal
in 12 Days
Picturesque, Praiseworthy, Pretty-much Perfect Portugal!
For complete information about this great tour, from the Rick Steves' Europe website, click here:
Hello and Welcome!
Hi! I'm Vickie, pictured here with my husband, Gary. Welcome to my scrapbook! Whether you're planning a trip to Portugal or just want to live vicariously through armchair travel, I'm happy you're here to browse around!
Have you ever done something completely on a whim and had it turn out more fabulous than you ever could have imagined? That was our Rick Steves tour of Portugal!
We never intended to go to Portugal in 2022. The plan was to take the Rick Steves Best of the Adriatic tour. We'd booked that one for 2020. It would be our 3rd Rick Steves tour and was intended to be a celebration of our 40th anniversary. But you know how that turned out. It couldn't happen in 2021 either. The first day that 2022 tours were open for booking, I registered for the tour and allowed myself to once again start dreaming about the terraced lakes and cascading waterfalls in Plitvice National Park, the fairytale-looking island in the middle of Lake Bled, the promenades on the Dalmation coast with their views of the crystal clear Adriatic Sea.
Months later we learned that a new grandchild was due right when we were going to be gone. Sorry, travel dreams, precious additions to the family come first! We looked for alternative dates for the Best of the Adriatic tour, but all those that worked for us were full. We went on a couple of waitlists but suspected our names were way down and our chances were slim.
In February, Gary said to me, "You know, we could pick a different tour." Out of nowhere, I heard myself ask, "Well, what about Portugal?" He shrugged his reply, "Sure, why not?" Within a half hour, I'd registered for the April 25 Heart of Portugal tour. I got a phone call from the Rick Steves home office the next day, a Saturday, confirming our spots, the last two for the date we'd picked. I immediately booked the flights, feeling a little thrill at the spontaneity of it all. And a little fickle that my heart's longing for Croatia and Slovenia was so quickly replaced with excitement for everything we might be seeing and doing in Portugal.
We enjoyed every minute of our 12 days in Portugal! It has beautiful cities and towns, lovely beaches and rural scenery, warm and friendly people, scrumptious food, and great wine. We learned so much about Portugal's proud history and its rich culture. We got great exercise hiking up and down all those steep hills! Icing on the cake was getting to experience this beautiful and fascinating country with a wonderful tour leader and 26 really fun new friends.
Come along now to share our experience!
(Travel tip: The website timeanddate.com is a great way to check historic weather. When I'm considering a visit to a city at what might be an "iffy" time of year, I do a five-year look-back on the weather there on my proposed dates.)
First things first
Before we get started, let me introduce you to our tour leader, Claúdia Costa. Claúdia lives in Lisbon and has been guiding for Rick Steves' Europe for nineteen years. She's awesome! Warm and kind and full of energy and enthusiasm, she made it fun, kept us organized, and taught us so much! There were lots of laughs (and special little treats!) along the way. We felt very humbled and grateful that she took the time to get to know each of us individually. We all have a friend in Portugal now.
Thank you, Claúdia,
from the bottom of our hearts!!
Getting around this website
The navigation in this scrapbook is super simple. The pages take you through our tour in chronological order. On each page, just scroll. At the bottom, click "next up" to keep going or "home" to return to this page to access the above buttons that will get you directly to where you want to go. Clicking "menu" in the top left corner of each page gets you back to those buttons too.
The Wow!! moments
When you see this big gold star, you know you are reading about one of the "Wow" moments of our trip!
Wow!!
April 25 - May 6
Was this a good time of year to go?
Yes! We had great weather. It rained for about an hour at the start of our walking tour on our first full day in Lisbon, but it was a light rain, and once Claúdia put away her pretty pink umbrella, we never got to see it again the whole 12 days. Temperatures tended to be in the mid to high 60's and we had 14 hours per day of daylight. Everything was open, flowers were in bloom, and crowds were manageable. Late April and early May was a great time to be in Portugal! (I was just a little envious that the group Claúdia guided in September got to stomp around barefooted in the vat of grapes at the wine estate in the Duoro Valley!)
No Grumps** in this bunch!
You'll see these faces in the pages that follow, so let me tell you about the 28 of us right away. Two sisters were traveling with their husbands, and there were 9 married couples who came on the tour by themselves (including us). Two women in the group left their husbands at home to enjoy a get-away as friends. And finally, three brothers and their sister were enjoying some sibling-bonding before meeting up with spouses and other family members at a wedding in Ireland. North, South, East and West, the U.S. was well represented. My husband and I live in Wisconsin. Our tour mates hailed from California, Idaho, Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Alabama. This was the 9th Rick Steves Europe tour for the most seasoned member of the group. Four in the group were newbies. Some are retired, others, alas, merely looking forward to that day. The smiles say it all--this was a super fun bunch of people who came as strangers and left as friends! We've stayed in contact with each other through a private Facebook group, and I'm excited to say that in 2023, eight of us will take another Rick Steves tour together. My husband and I are part of that next adventure. Our chosen tour? My patience paid off! Our long awaited Best of the Adriatic tour will be enjoyed with friends!
**Our Rick Steves tour mates, for all three tours, have brought diverse backgrounds and experience to the group. A common denominator is that everyone has been easy to travel with. I love it that Rick has boldly announced a "No Grumps" policy for his tours, gutsy enough to convey the message that if you are a high maintenance person who is going to look for things to complain about, please pick a different tour company!
Behind the wheel
Rounding out our team, here is our bus driver Paulo. He did such an expert job taking us all over Portugal! We just got to spread ourselves out in his big, comfy Mercedes-Benz bus and relish the views. I'll share my little secret: Everyone seems to prefer seats near the front of the bus, but I think the rear seat is the very best place to be. Just turn around and you can see both sides of the road at once out of that big window, a panoramic feast for your eyes! Portugal has such beautiful scenery! The photo at the top of this page was taken from the window of the bus, featured on this Home page so you can see just how wonderful the bus rides are! Bus time goes quickly with views like that! And this:
How active was this tour?
The fitness app on my phone told me that our most active days on the tour were the first and last full days. On our first day, in Lisbon, I had 17,330 steps and on our last day, in Porto, my step count was 17,892. This, of course, was a combination of group time and my free-time excursions. Most days I had around 10,000 steps. The activity level was just right! We ate such great food for 12 days, but because of all the walking, I didn't have to let out any of my clothes when I got home!
A word about my photos
I'm strictly an amateur, but photography has been a hobby of mine for many years. I love my Nikon DSLR camera. It captured some great photos on my prior two Rick Steves tours. But it's heavy, takes up a lot of space, and unless kept in the "auto" exposure mode (and then what's the point?), it doesn't lend itself to a quick, spontaneous picture. Overdue for new phones, Gary and I upgraded to new iPhone 13 Pros just before this trip. I was very happy with the phone's camera and decided to leave the Nikon behind this time. I'm a little sad to admit I never missed it. A bonus to brand new phones was the three to four days of battery life before needing to re-charge. It allowed us to leave our portable chargers at home. I never pass on the opportunity to remove a few more items from my pile of things to pack. If you are going to be traveling and it's almost time for a new phone anyway, treat yourself prior to your trip, for that great battery life! Just buy it enough in advance that you can learn all the camera features.
The elephant in the room
What about Covid? The pandemic kept all of us at home in 2020. My husband and I first tiptoed back into international travel by going to Italy with friends in late October of 2021. Our main cabin section of the plane had only about 20 people in it and we got to see Trevi Fountain without crowds blocking the view. By the time we took our Rick Steves tour of Portugal, six months later, tourism was once again flourishing. I'll admit that Covid added a layer of uncertainty (and a teensy bit of stress) in advance of our tour. We were going to need to take a Covid test within 72 hours of our flight departure time. Another within 48 hours of our tour's welcome meeting. Another within 24 hours of our flight home. Rick Steves' Europe implemented amazing Covid-interruption policies for its 2022 tours. I haven't heard of any other tour companies that were refunding a pro rata portion of the tour fee if a member had to drop out due to testing positive for Covid. My husband and I purchased good insurance to give us an extra layer of protection on top of that. And then we just crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. The folks in Edmunds, Washington helpfully updated the company's website each Friday in the 2022 tour season to provide information on how Covid had impacted the tours that had been completed that week. For those skimming the 2022 scrapbooks to learn more about that, I can happily report that no one in our group got sick. Masks were required on the bus, and all in our group respected and obeyed that rule. Elsewhere, masking was at each individual's discretion unless we were visiting a site that required it (rare). You'll see some masks in the photos in this scrapbook, but because Covid was a non-issue on our tour, this blurb is about all you're going to read about it!
The people we met along the way
These are our local guides, who enriched our experience with their passionate, lively presentations, and our hosts at the cork farm and Duoro Valley wine estate, who so warmly welcomed us and treated us like family. Long after the memories of the places have started to fade, I'll remember these people. They pour their hearts into their work. Making these connections was a priceless experience.
Ju, our guide at the Jerónimos Monastery in the Belém district of Lisbon
Cristine at Coimbra University
Maria in Évora
Teresa Carvalho, one of the seven siblings who now run Quinta Santa Eufemia, the wine estate that their great-grandfather started
Members of the Rovisco Garcia family, at their cork farm, L to R: Gonçalo, Sofia and Francisco. Gonçalo and Sofia are siblings, two of the three grandchildren of Maria, the 97-year-old owner of the estate. Francisco is Gonçalo's son, Maria's oldest great-grandchild.
Ricardo and Joana took us on a food tour in Porto.
Margarida in Porto
Scrapbooking Evolution
I had a lot of fun making this scrapbook! It was such a great way to re-live the memories of our fabulous tour of Portugal!
We have a cupboard in our home that holds some heavy, bulging scrapbooks from Gary's and my first 30 years of travel. The cardstock pages, slipped into plastic page protectors, are full of ticket stubs, brochures, hotel and restaurant business cards, postcards, and dozens and dozens of photos, printed from negatives, with handwritten captions. And, of course, stickers. Lots of stickers! In the earliest of those books, I used rubber cement to attach everything. Later I graduated to glue dots and mounting squares. It's an unruly collection, but I treasure the precious memories documented in each of those scrapbooks: Our honeymoon in Switzerland on a bargain-basement budget, the first time either of us had been to Europe. Trips with our four children when they were young, to places like Disney World and the National Parks. Two whirlwind weeks spent helping chaperone one daughter's youth orchestra trip to China. An apartment in Paris for a week when we finally got back to Europe for the first time since our honeymoon, in celebration of our 25th anniversary. Venice, Florence and Rome with Gary's mom when she was 80, the one and only time she ever used a passport, a dream-come-true experience she never stopped talking about for the rest of her life.
In 2010 I decided to create an account with one of the online scrapbooking software companies and try making a scrapbook that way, and now a bookcase in our home sports a much tidier collection of 12 x 12 memory books from our last dozen years of travel. They include books from our two prior Rick Steves tours and from five independent trips we've taken to Europe with friends. With digital photography giving me leeway to take as many pictures as my heart desires, the photo count in each of my books has gone up from dozens to hundreds.
This Portugal scrapbook is the very first time I've used a website builder to make a strictly digital scrapbook. I'm honored that you're taking the time to browse! Now . . . . turn the page and let's visit Portugal!