Today we were to get our car to start our drive around Portugal. We got up, took quick showers and ate breakfast. Then we went down to wait for the car. When the car came, I filled out the paper work and he showed me the car. It is a Volkswagen with automatic transmission and has a push start instead of a key to crank it. At first I could not figure how to get it started. I pressed the button and nothing happened, I held the button down and still it did not crank. Finally I put my foot on the brake and pushed the start button and it cranked. We had gotten a gps from the car company so we tried to put in the address in and get it to work. Again we ran into problems, I could not get it to change to English and we could not figure out where to plug it into the car to charge it. Finally I told Jay we would just start driving and if we kept driving in the same direction we would eventually get out of Porto. So off we went. It took me a while to get used to the car and the road conditions. After a while, we ended up at the Atlantic Ocean. At this point, Jay asked for my phone and typed the town into it and got the directions. So off we went, and we made it out of Porto. We got on one of the toll roads and messed up because we went through the lane where we had to take a ticket. We had a transponder which automatically pays the tolls. We eventually got off the freeway and started going on the narrow back roads. This is the way I like to travel, because then you see the little towns. We managed to find our next hotel. We are staying near Lamego at the Wine House Hotel or Quinta da Pacheca. It is a working winery. They still use their feet and stamp the grapes to get the juice. After the tour we had a wine tasting where we tasted four different wines that they produced. Jay and I are not drinkers, but we did taste the wines.
After the wine tour, we went back to our room, where I took a nap until our dinner reservations at 7:30. The restaurant is very fancy. We were seated and for dinner I ordered monkfish and prawns in a citrus sauce with mashed potatoes with almonds. While we were waiting, someone came with a basket of three different types of bread and we got our choice. They also brought us our soft drinks and filled our water glasses. Then they brought our food, it was very good. When you drank all your soft drink, the waiter would appear and pour the remained out of the can. We ordered dessert, I had the duo of chocolate. There was a moist chocolate cake, a macaroon and a hard chocolate fudge square and also a scoop of orange sherbet. Jay had the sliced fruit plate. After that it was time to return to our room and plot out our journey for the next day.
