Thursday, April 30- cloudy with sunny periods. Our apartment is awesome and in a great location. We are so impressed with Porto, the charm and beauty everywhere. We walk to the information center at 9am and get ourselves organized for our day. We will do our own walking tour. The agent shows us all the points of interest, and there are many. We get pointed in the direction of the market. It is situated in an old building, almost looks like an abandoned train station.

So many fruits and vegetables.

Many fish stalls as well.

Who can forget the meats. 

Not sure if this was just a display item!

Sping is definitely here if not in NB.

We then head to the train station (San Bento) as it has mosaic walls inside. Really beautiful. I think most of the people in there were tourists, not travellers.

In the train station. 

Really cool stuff. 

Then onto church Sto Lidefonso. From here we can see the river below and the region they call Ribeiro. 

Walking up to the church from the train station. 

View of the city below us.

View of the Douro river. 

Stain glass inside the church. 

Altar inside church.

We then proceed to walk down to the river area. 

Narrow streets walking down.

Careful walking here.

City across the way. Vila de Gaia. This is where the port merchants were in the day. Now these caves are visited by thousands of tourists. 

We then take a boat tour, just the three of us. There are many boats and not enough tourists this time of year. What a surprise to us. It was very busy, so we thought. 

Boarding the boat.

Ron relaxing while we wait.

Still waiting to leave. 

My turn. Waiting for more tourists, but there are no more.

Boats moored 

We visited the caves of this port making family. We then tasted their white port and their Tawny flavour. Both were quite good. 

We then started the walk back towards our hotel as we wanted to stop by the info center again to ask about taking the train tomorrow. May 1st is a holiday so we weren't sure if there would be changes to the schedules. We also decided to eat in. Rain was threatening. We went to the grocery store and bought ingredients to make a salad. Rémi and I bought tuna to add to ours only find that it was tuna pâté. Ron said that we needed to find a cat as it looked and smelled like cat food. He had bought some chorizo to add to his salad. We also had a nice bottle of wine. After supper we decided to go out for a short walk. The rain was still holding off. It was nice with light illuminating the churches. I forgot my camera, but Rémi took some. We got back and booked a hotel room for Coimbra, where we will stay for the next 3 days. We tried to stay in Porto or a city nearby, but bacause of the holiday, it was very booked up and expensive. We will rent a car Saturday in order to use Coimbra as a starting point and do some touring from there. On Monday we will head to Lisbon and do the same thing there.