Highlights of Porto 2, Porto, Portugal

I frequently end my retrospectives of travel visits with a variation of “didn’t do it justice, need to come back”. There may be a dozen major destinations in Europe that I can claim great familiarity with, but most of the places are usually given a relatively brief look-over.

Who is ever able to do “slow travel” anyway? With professional obligations, family constraints, distances to get there and back, and the sheer number of places that warrant visiting, we always opt for quantity over quality on any given itinerary. Every day brings new locations to see, sometimes two or three in the space of a few hours. Spending more than a day in a given locale is customarily an unpalatable opportunity cost.

(The people among my readership who can easily envision themselves spending a whole week in one place - as long as that place is a poolside lounge chair at a Caribbean resort - will have to forgive me for labeling that vacationing rather than traveling, and therefore not applicable to the present discourse.)

Our first visit to Porto was no exception from the general rule. Even as we had our base smack in the city center for four nights and thus enjoyed quite a bit more of Porto than would be possible with a passing visit, we day-tripped elsewhere for large portions of the stay, giving ourselves roughly just a day and a half to explore Porto itself. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).