Itinerary Highlights - Page 3
Three Small(er) Towns - Evora, Nazare and ObidosAll are worth visiting for their own reasons. Evora is a great university town with a lot of history - my favorite part of the day was just wandering around and discovering the smaller churches (don't miss the beautifully-tiled Igreja de Sao Joao Evangelista!) and out-of-the-way streets. Nazaré has a gorgeous beach where you will likely be one of the few American tourists. The culinary highlight here was eating the incredibly fresh fish stew up the hill in Sitio. (Tip - if you're at all potentially squeamish about what kind of seafood you're eating, wait until the end of the dinner to ask what was in your stew that night - I was pleasantly surprised that really liked the moray eel!) Óbidos was probably my favorite of the three - while it's rather touristy, it deserves the attention and I would like to go back to stay overnight and experience what it's like after all the daytrippers are gone.
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Farm VisitsHands down - if I was in doubt about paying for a Rick Steves tour, these two days put that to rest. The first farm - Rovisco Garcia - produces cork, olives and pine nuts. First we toured the farm in a special jeep/truck built especially for the Rick Steves tours and then we had a wonderful lunch prepared by and eaten with the family who own & run the farm. The second farm - Quinta Santa Eufemia - is in the Duoro Valley and has been run by the same family producing port for multiple generations. As it happened to be the grape harvest when we were there, we got the opportunity to help stomp grapes (still utilized by many smaller port producers who believe that the machinery changes the taste of the grapes). Those of us who participated got a change of clothing to enter the huge vat of grapes (up to mid-thigh on me) and we did about 15-20 minutes of stomping to live accordion music. (And luckily we avoided the 'I Love Lucy' mishaps!) The day was capped by possibly my favorite meal of the whole trip - we had this homemade 'cod casserole' (my term not theirs) that is made with cod, potatoes, cheese and lot of yummy olive oil!
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