We’ve reached peak SMP

We’d been warned that July 15 through the end of August was the peak of the tourist crush here in SMP. People have used adjectives like “crazy” and “overwhelming” when describing the tourist onslaught. Keeping in mind that SMP is a destination for Portuguese families and not some Florida panhandle Spring Break town, I think the hyperbole is unwarranted. Sure, there are LOTS of people on the beach, parking in town is hard to come by, it’s currently faster to go around city center than through it, and our newly refreshed Intermarché is picked over by tourist families cooking at home. But, if this is as bad as it gets, it’s totally manageable from our perspective. Plus the tourists make the summer Fartura stand possible (thus far we have stopped for a Fartura more often than not when we walk by the stand).

Honestly our only legitimate complaint is related to Nazaré. There’s a tour company in Nazaré that does dune buggy excursions, which involves caravans of 5-7 caged vehicles driving the dirt roads between Nazaré and SMP, stopping at the lookout above our place, taking a slow lap around the bay in SMP, and heading back to Nazaré. We frequently encounter the dune buggy tours on our clifftop walks with W&B. I have to say that it looks miserable. Everyone who is not in the lead vehicle is wearing goggles and bandanas around their mouths to keep from choking on dust kicked up by the preceding vehicles and we’ve never seen anyone smiling. We have plenty of warning they are coming because of the noise they make. Whenever the dust parade comes ripping along the road toward us, we find someplace handy to move to the side to let them pass because I don’t trust they have decent visibility out of their grimy goggles. I spent some time musing on why watching them go by felt vaguely familiar and I settled on the notion that it’s reminiscent of a scene from Rat Patrol (one of my favorite WWII shows about the North African campaign as a kid).

Dune buggy parades notwithstanding, we’ve settled into a slightly modified routine while the tourist crush is on. We are doing more walking along the cliffs than the bay and more cooking at home while the restaurants are under siege. Other than that it’s business as usual.

We have two sets of couple friends from Austin, Mike and Ron and Natalie and Rob who are building villas about 10 minutes away from SMP in the village of Famalicão. We met Mike and Ron through a mutual friend in Austin when that friend heard we were moving to Portugal and were amazed to find out we’d all independently picked this tiny little patch of Portugal. Mike and Ron introduced us to Natalie and Rob, their good friends who’d decided to follow Ron and Mike’s lead in building here.

Early last week Natalie and Rob were in-country – staying in Nazaré – to check on their constructions and finalize some design decisions. It was super fun to meet up with them a couple of times while they were here to just get caught up, talk through our experiences in our first 90 days on the ground, and we even got to show them a little bit about why we love SMP so much.

Shortly after we saw Natalie and Rob, our friend Amy and her daughter Evelyn came to stay with us for a few days. After spending a few days in Lisboa, getting over the worst of jet lag, Amy and Evelyn hopped a bus to Caldas da Rainha, where Jill and I picked them up.

We popped over to Nazaré on their first full day here.

After working up an appetite walking all over Nazaré, we popped into La Muñeca, the only taqueria we’ve found so far in our area, for a delicious meal. I discovered their shrimp aguachiles, which is my new favorite there.

The next day we went inland to see some historical sites. We started with the Mosteiro da Batalha (Monastery of Batalha), which was erected on the order of Dom João I (King John the First) and built in the Manueline style over about 150 years, with construction starting in 1385 and completion in 1517. The building was sacked and burned by Napoleon’s troops and restored in the 1800’s.

There was a wedding slated for later that afternoon at the monastery (we were there on a Saturday) and we were serenaded by chamber music as the musicians warmed up for the ceremony…

https://videopress.com/v/eayNI517?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

We then moved on to Tomar, which is home to a famous convent – the Convento do Christo.

We’ve been wondering whether we needed to warn potential guests about the crowds of the tourist season in SMP. Between our experience with Natalie and Rob and hosting Amy and Evelyn, I’ve concluded the answer is no. We may curate your visit a little differently to avoid crowds, but there’s plenty to see and do that’s not crowded. Nazaré was bustling but not overrun with people and we shared the monastery and the convent with maybe 50 people at each site.

One of the things we’d been looking forward to in conjunction with Amy and Evelyn’s visit was that it was going to give us an excuse to brave to the regional train system. Amy and Evelyn were set to meet up with some traveling companions in O Porto (NOT just Porto. It’s “O Porto” because in Portuguese taxonomy if the name of location contains a common noun you have to use the article. Porto means “port” so it is correctly referred to as “The Port” or “O Porto” – and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the airport designation is OPO). I’d booked train tickets from SMP to O Porto for the four of us on Sunday with a return trip for just me and Jill on Monday (more on that later). It was a beginner-level experience that involved us catching a train from SMP to Coimbra (the university town where I had my residency appointment) and then changing trains in Coimbra to continue on to O Porto.

Not knowing what we would encounter, we packed baguette sandwiches, fruit, and our good attitudes for the train adventure.

Our first lesson was that at hinterland stations like SMP, where there are no train system personnel working, you are on your own to figure out which track your train will arrive on. Our station consists of three tracks and a printed paper schedule on the cork boards that shows what time the various trains are scheduled to come through SMP. Fortunately, we knew which direction our train was coming from so we positioned ourselves to see in advance which track it was going to be coming in so we could scuttle to our proper platform.

Our train was running a few minutes behind schedule and we started to wonder whether it was going to come at all and then we heard the railroad crossing bells start to ring and spied our train approaching from the south on the next track over from where we were waiting. We had no trouble getting to the correct platform before our train rolled to a stop and was ready to board.

The train trip to Coimbra was mostly uneventful, but we did learn something new. When we’ve ridden the bus you just show your ticket QR code to the driver at the door and go find your seat, but when the conductor comes through the train to check your ticket he wants to see ID, because he’s got a list of passengers he’s checking against. This was the first opportunity I’d had since getting my residency card to present it as a valid form of identification. The conductor matched our residency cards and Amy and Evelyn’s passports against his passenger list, gave them back to us and moved on down the train.

The Coimbra station was the big leagues compared to our little station in SMP. It had a monitor to show which trains were arriving on which platforms with their scheduled and predicted times plus it had fair-warning announcements of arrivals and departures. A couple of the monitors were showing the Microsoft Blue Screen of Death (as we were traveling shortly after the big Crowdstrike debacle) but there were others that were working and they showed our connecting train about 10 minutes behind schedule.

Our connection to O Porto arrived at the updated time shown on the board, it was easy to stow our bags and find our seats, and then we were off again.

We arrived at O Porto’s Campanha station, a multimodal train/bus hub, right on time and put Amy and Evelyn into a taxi to their accommodations. And Jill and I hopped into the next taxi in line to take us to our hotel.

When we were last in O Porto it was on the heels of having picked SMP as our desired destination and we had a bit of a celebratory mindset. Perhaps for that reason, both Jill and I think O Porto has a slight edge over Lisboa in terms of being our favorite – which is not to say we don’t like Lisboa, because we do.

When picking a hotel this time around, Jill chose a hotel right on the water, the Pestana Vintage Porto, where we’d enjoyed a nice happy hour last go round. Sure enough within 5 minutes of checking in we were at a street side table watching the world go by with espresso martinis.

It turns out that Amy and Evelyn were staying nearby so Amy came and joined us for an espresso martini and then the three of us set off across the river to explore Vila Nova de Gaia, which is the hub of the port wine industry just across from the oldest part of O Porto.

We walked Amy back across the bridge so she could go to dinner with her traveling companions and we popped into a sushi restaurant that Jill spied earlier in the day just up from our hotel. We had an amazing meal and will definitely go back when we are next in O Porto

Our plan had been to take the 11:30AM train back to SMP on Monday morning, but Jill caught a news flash a couple of weeks ago about a planned rail strike on Monday July 22. Not knowing what that meant, we wisely purchased bus tickets (a €9 insurance policy) for the 2:30PM bus back to SMP as a backup in case our train home was impacted by the strike.

We asked the person at the front desk at our hotel how to know whether we would be impacted and they said that, unfortunately, the only way to know for sure was to be standing there when your train didn’t leave. And since our plans involved change to another train in Coimbra, even if the first train was running as scheduled we could find ourselves in Coimbra without a train for the second half of our journey. Discretion being the better part of valor, we wisely decided to pull the plug on the train tickets. The good news is the CP (Comboios de Portugal or “Trains of Portugal”) app makes it super easy to get a refund for any reason up to 15 minutes before your scheduled departure so a couple of clicks later I had the €50-ish back in our bank account.

Now that we know how the strike actually played out, it was 100% the right answer for us to fall back to the bus. 80% of all trains in Portugal were idled on Monday and we certainly would not have made it home.

That also gave us a few extra hours in O Porto on Monday so, after a delicious breakfast at the hotel, we set off on foot to meet Amy and show her around the part of O Porto that we know well. The most important thing was to show her where La Salumeria, our favorite 6-table Italian restaurant is so that she could dine there one night while in O Porto.

We stopped for a few photo ops

And then it was time for me and Jill to head back to pick up our bag from the hotel and take a taxi to the Campanha station to catch our bus.

When we arrived at the Campanha station it seemed pretty crowded in the bus terminal, but we don’t have anything to baseline that perception against. My guess is there were a lot of extra people who, like us, had originally been booked on trains and needed to make the switch to a bus. I’m SO glad Jill heard about the strike weeks ago because it would have been easy to be in the dark. We now know where the part of the CP site is that publishes possible disruptions and we will check that religiously in the future. My suspicion is that there were plenty of people at the Campanha station who didn’t get a seat on a bus, because it turned out our bus was completely full.

We stopped and got snacks and water bottles in advance of getting on our bus and found our seats like seasoned professionals. We had a direct bus that would make a few stops on the way home, but we didn’t need to make a transfer anywhere so we felt like we were in really good shape. The bus left right on time at 2:30PM and we were making good time until about 5 minutes outside of Coimbra. That was when there was a big jolt and the bus driver eased over to the shoulder and stopped.

I assumed we’d blown a tire, but it turned out that someone had come up behind the bus in the right hand lane at high speed (this is an assumption on my part) with the bus traveling the posted limit and they’d misjudged a lane change to pass the bus and clipped the left rear corner of the bus.

I’ll lead with EVERONE IS OK! That’s the important part. But it took a little while to sort out what had happened. The SUV that rear-ended the bus apparently caromed and wedged its front end in the guard rail on the inside of the left-hand lane and we didn’t see it at first because it was about a quarter-mile back from where we’d pulled over on the shoulder. The first official vehicle on scene was a GNR sedan, followed quickly by one of the roving roadside assistance trucks. Once they’d checked the driver of the SUV they started putting out cones to block the lane occupied by the crashed SUV. Next on scene was the Bombeiros (fire dept paramedics). They didn’t whisk anyone away to the hospital which we thought was a good sign.

We spent about an hour and a half on the side of the road while our driver, who handled himself very professionally, walked back and forth between our bus and the GNR officer assigned to the incident. At no point did we exit the bus and, thankfully, the AC stayed on the entire time because the external thermometer on the bus was reading 40C (104F) and the bus was full of people which made it hard for the AC to keep up in a stationary vehicle. We were thinking maybe they’d send us a replacement bus, but the next thing we knew the bus was in gear and we were moving along. The driver must have cut some stops short because we arrived at our stop in SMP only about 45 minutes behind schedule.

All’s well that ends well, but what an adventure…

Adventure is out there!