Feeling confident coming off our Albanian bike tour & with a few weeks to fill before meeting family in Portugal, we last minute decided to do a self-guided ride from Porto to the Southwestern border with Spain. We procured bikes, downloaded the route to our phones, and headed out without anything else booked. We got very accustomed to hotel breakfasts, mid-morning pastry stops, lunchtime bifanas, and picking a spot to sleep once our legs got tired. Our bikes weren't the best. The route included lovely views & some very challenging parts. We are enamored with Portugal. More details on our route:


Our first day started a bit later than intended; the shop moved pretty slowly as well as some last-minute packing decisions. Kelsey is glad to report she packed lighter & had everything she needed from the get-go. We had a super easy ride along the coast in bike lanes until we reached our first super sleepy, off-season beach town. The following morning we set off for a ferry with breakfast leftovers packed up thanks to our friendly host; we, unfortunately, misunderstood the ferry schedule & spent the foggy morning at a coffee shop awaiting the next one.


The easy roads ended here; we began joking and were usually correct, that given a choice the route would always send us down the worse road.

Cafe X, our favorite bakery in all of Portugal, saved us from bonking on one of our longest & hardest days. Our second day attempted to send us down a closed highway that was entirely stripped and about 40% through repaving. We managed to circumvent a bit of the route, but eventually, we had to deal with the exceptionally bumpy path. While we did have some intermittent nice stretches of bike lanes along the coast, we had many gravel farming roads, a few days that dumped us onto soft sand, and a full-on mountain biking day. Sometimes we had other options; often, we just had to commit to it & hope to not fall. Kelsey's bike chain loved to pop off & was unable to shift gears for the last three days (fortunately, those were all flat). Kyle was on a regular bike, so he's the real champ. His faulty kickstand eventually caused real damage & we had about an hour delay for Kyle to replace a component on his bike. 


There were also ups; the scenery was stunning, the Portuguese people friendly, we dove into the world of Port & cheap Portuguese wine, and did we mention the pastries + bifanas? We met up with a few friends along the way & made a few new ones at an all-you-can-drink sangria rooftop BBQ with our hostel. Our favorite towns were Nazaré, Setúbal, and Zambujeira. The most disappointing was Albufeira, a British Daytona Beach, but still gorgeous.


We covered 565 miles with 20.9K feet in elevation over 18 days. It was an amazing experience. 


Reading:

  • Kyle: Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux
  • Kelsey: Verity by Colleen Hoover, Force of Nature by Jane Harper, The Housemaid by Freida McFadden

Listening To: