Scouting in earnest

Visits and re-visits (67)

We leave tomorrow for a trip to Coimbra and Braga; those are the other two cities we’re considering along with Lisbon. We hope this will be the final excursion to help us decide where we’ll make our future home. If anyone has any suggestions as to what we should see in either place, let us know!

As you can see, the entire distance is 566 km/352 miles. It’s almost a dead straight shot north too. This whole area from Lisbon to Porto is known as the Silver Coast and does include inland Coimbra. Braga is a tad north and also inland.

We’ve been wanting to make this trip for a month now, but life is busy here, even though we don’t have anything like work to clutter it up. So it kept falling to the bottom of the pile. Naturally, this looks to be the first rainy weekend of the year!

Our first attempt to go was during a major railway strike that ended yesterday. (Yes, there are many strikes here. You work around them as best you can.) When thinking about our earlier trip we discovered a cheap, direct bus to Coimbra. We’re going to give that a try to see what it’s like. The trip is two hours on the highway, a little less on the train.

From Coimbra to Braga is the same. It’ll surprise none of you that the trip back is about 3.5 - 4 hours, depending upon how you go. (No, we can’t explain why the Google map above says it’s a 5.5 hour drive when the bus schedule says it takes 4 hours. Maybe the bus drives at 100km/h? Or Flixbus has some secret wormhole technology? Or cars sit at tollbooths for 90 minutes along the way while the bus skips them entirely? Or maybe Google just doesn’t know how to estimate driving time well? We’ll let you know if we experience any temporal anomalies en route.)

This is the first time since our days of tenting our way around the US that we’ll be planning ahead only one night at a time. We have an Airbnb picked in Coimbra for tomorrow, and that’s it. After that, we stay in each place as long as we want, grabbing Airbnb's as we go (no tents in cities!). The first one has us a little nervous - we were all set to pull the trigger on different place but a review said it didn’t have heat. Hm. This one doesn’t say either way. A bit nervous there. Especially if we’re coming in wet from the rain, no heat won’t be fun.

Our real estate agent, Heather Youngman, helpfully mapped out where we should concentrate our time.

Coimbra is home to the oldest university in Portugal, and the ninth oldest in the world – U Coimbra was founded in 1290 (!). We’ve not seen the city yet but we’ve heard wonderful things. It looks like they already have a church, if it’s a little … different (the pastor speaks a phrase in Portuguese and a translator repeats it English). They have a board game store. (We’re not sure about board game get-togethers. We’ll be asking around.) The restaurant scene looks good – better than Braga’s on paper – but does it taste good to more than just college students?

As you know, we’ve been to Braga before. We really like Braga. Braga feels right. It also has drawbacks.

One concern is that Braga is cold and raw in the winter. Escaping to, say, a restaurant doesn’t help because many businesses leave their doors open and/or aren’t heated. Still, we’re going to put on our longjohns and try the rare Indian restaurant in town, and maybe a Mexican one as well. To see if we can find a work-around for the open door policy, we’ll investigate the eateries in the mall. (We’ve had some surprisingly good ones in Lisbon malls, so fingers crossed.) To get there, we’ll take the local bus because we haven’t tried the public transport in Braga yet.

The second issue is Braga does not currently have a church. However, it turns out someone may be planting one soon. We’ll be doing a lot of research on that.

That’s all for now.

Love from Lisbon,

Amy & Scott