Travel 2020

Disclaimer:  All voyages in this blog are being taken safely in the comfort of our imaginations - based on our plans and intentions for travel in 2020. What is reality after all?  We're slowly catching up with travels in the last few days - and this posting details (briefly) the drive from Coimbra to Porto . Driven directly, this would have just taken a little over an hour and a quarter, so again we diverted on the way to look at a town where we'd stayed on our first trip in 1988: Aveiro . But on the way, we were 'distracted' by the cute fisher people's cottages on the Costa Nova do Prado , particularly on Av. José Estevão in Gafanha da Encarnação , just south of Aveiro , so stopped here for a wander: While we were there, we decided to have lunch in a restaurant in one of these houses, looking out onto the lagoon from the narrow spit of land along the coast: Lunch was its usual gastronomic affair: including a large pot of seafood: ...

Disclaimer:  All voyages in this blog are being taken safely in the comfort of our imaginations - based on our plans and intentions for travel in 2020. What is reality after all?  On our library door, back home in Melbourne, is a poster of the interior of the University Library in Coimbra : We first went here we think in 1988 and have been reminded of its splendour. The same poster was also on the wall of our bedroom in a guest house ( Casa Pombal ) on a second visit some years later. It was on our schedule to return. We spent two full days in Coimbra , one wandering around the University (the oldest in Portugal we are told), and one driving the short 20 minutes to the excavations of the Roman site of Conimbriga , near Condeixa-a-Nova . A day around Coimbra We started our city wanders in the old University, perched on its steep hill above the river. Our apartment is on the other side of the hill, and though it's fairly high up, it's still really only half the cli...