Reid & Robie

Any Portuguese town looks like bride’s finery – something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.

– Mary McCarthy

Hello, Robie once again. I am happy to report that Reid has completed the Camino del Norte and is currently working on new articles for the website. While she is resting and writing I’m bringing you this week’s post.

No, Portugal is not the sixty-fifth country ever created. I wasn’t even sure that there was such a list, but when I Googled it there were several sites claiming that some of the earliest countries are in Africa.

But for me, Portugal is the sixty-fifth country I have had the pleasure of visiting. This may seem a trivial thing to keep track of, but when you are married to a world traveler like Reid it feels important. I will never eclipse Reid’s country list, which I believe is in excess of ninety, having been to places that once were a country and now are many like the former Yugoslavia. Together we’ve traveled back to the region adding Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Kosovo to her visits to Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Croatia. How can I possibly compete with that?

Before meeting Reid I’d only been to Tijuana for a day trip with my dad looking to buy a switchblade and Nassau on a three-day cruise from Florida. Then I met Reid and my world view changed forever. Her love of travel bit me like some infectious mosquito and I’ve never quite been the same since.

With Reid at my side we’ve traveled to six of the world’s seven continents, visiting places like The Great Wall of China, the Incan city of Machu Picchu, Chobe National Park in Botswana and a river cruise on the Nile in Egypt to name a few. We also spent almost two years sailing a clockwise circumnavigation of the Caribbean Sea abord our 41’ Morgan Out Island, The Last Resort with our two cats. In thirty years of marriage our love of travel has never abated. It’s grown to the point we’re now retired, homeless nomads currently traveling around Europe with the rest of the world before us and no end in sight.

When we started planning this nomadic life we each had goals we wanted to accomplish in Europe. Mine was simple, go to Scotland and meet my golfing friends in St Andrews to play at The Home of Golf. Reid had a loftier and more difficult goal. She longed to walk the five-hundred-mile Path of Saint James on the Camino del Norte along the northern coast of Spain with her sister. I am proud to say she completed this goal last week.

While Reid was hiking, I traveled around Italy with my brother-in-law, taking him to some of the places I’d been in the past and exploring new areas neither of us had visited. I detailed some of these in the post, Northern Italy: Off the Beaten Path. At some point I knew we’d head back to Spain to meet our wives and proposed, for selfish reasons, staging ourselvesin northern Portugal, close to Santiago de Compostela. And since it was a country I had never been to before, I notched my sixty-fifth country.

We flew from Milan to Porto staying in an apartment in the historic center, a UNESCO World Heritage site, for five days.

Porto has a long history, first being settled by Celtic tribes and then becoming a trading post for the Romans around 138 BCE who recognized its importance at the mouth of the Duro River. It’s the birthplace of Prince Henry the Navigator who was instrumental in founding Portugal’s Age of Discovery in the mid-1420’s. As administrator general of the Order of Christ he used funds from the Order to finance sailing explorations along the western coast of Africa leading to the discovery and settlement of the island of Madeira and bringing African trade to the country. The Age of Discovery he initiated would lead to Vasco da Gama finding the first maritime trade route to India and exploration of the subcontinent.

Porto is most known for its delicious, fortified wine, Port. The vineyards along the Duro river became the first officially demarcated wine region in the world in 1757 to protect the quality of Port wine as trade with England and other countries helped the city become the second largest in Portugal.

During our stay in Porto we got word from our wives of their proposed date to arrive in Santiago de Compostela and moved to Viana do Castelo, close to the Spanish border where we could take a train and meet them at the end of their Camino.

Viana is a port city located on the Limia River about an hour north of Porto. It too has a rich history dating back to pre-Roman times. It was also an important part of the Age of Discovery as a port and a center for shipbuilding. It later became an epicenter for both fishing and salt trade and its Cod fishing industry is still going strong today. It is also home to the beautiful Sanctuary of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on Mount Santa Luzia that is modeled after Sacre-Coeur in Paris and overlooks the city.