After I posted yesterday, I thought about that photo of me consuming some red table wine. No doubt I was looking kind of mellow in the shot. In actuality I was blissed and it didn’t take much. That day was filled with serendipity. We had gotten on the wrong train, gone to the wrong town, and were just wandering around. It was foggy but there was a pervasive smell of freshly grilled seafood. Suddenly we came upon a restaurant with a gentleman out in front grilling fish.
We went in and ordered based on a menu that had pictures of the food. To wash our food down we ordered some wine. One of the great things about travelling in Portugal is that the table wine is both inexpensive and good. Most people when then think about alcohol coming from Portugal focus on the fortified port wines. But Portugal produces a number of other fine alcoholic beverages. Quite importantly they are readily available and inexpensive.
One that I like quite a bit is called vinho verde. This comes from up around the Douro Valley area where the grapes used to make port come from. However, in contrast to port wine vinho verde is a very light crisp drink with a delicate to moderate fruity flavor. It is an excellent late afternoon drink, kind of a dessert after a day of arduous labors wine. You can find several quite tasty vinho verde brands in the “Spanish” wine section of Whole Paycheck Markets. For centuries Portugal fought to not be Spain but an American grocery chain has given Spain a kind of W.
I digress. At restaurants red table wines are called tinto and are only a couple of euros for two full glasses and a wee bit more. In yesterday’s photo I was drinking tinto and obviously enjoying it. Imagine my surprise yesterday when I was walking through Costo and saw this display on Sunday. Tinto is available at the big box store. Hey maybe you cannot meet me in Portugal but at least you can share in what I am drinking. This assumes you duck in quickly to Costco.
As to the mechanics of the upcoming trip I spent the morning today trying to rebook my seats for my flight. Once again that have changed the equipment on the overseas flight. Additionally, as I previously noted they have sent me to Illinois to get to Toronto. This meant I had to rebook seats on two additional flights. One of the flights was on another airline so I had to go to their website in addition to working with Air Canada’s. As it stands, I have seats all arranged. I tried to call Air Canada to see if there is any possible way to go from DTW directly to Toronto. All I got was a recording that their customer service center was so overburdened they could not take any more calls at the current time. I will try tomorrow in the early morning hours. This is the current state of air travel.
Also, I spent about half an hour trying to figure out where I could get PCR tests. Not an easy task given the time constraints the airlines and the Portuguese government put on the tests.
