Portugal: Lisbon to Porto

This was our first group trip to Portugal, and we picked November because the summer crowds are gone and prices drop. We got two rainy days and nine beautiful ones, which is a good deal.

Lisbon is a city of hills, and we underestimated how steep they are. By day two, someone had started calling the trams "the only good idea in this city." We rode the 28 through the Alfama, and our local guide spent the whole ride reminding everybody to keep a hand on their bags. Nobody lost anything, so it worked.

The custard tarts deserve their own paragraph. We went to the famous bakery in Belém, where they've been making them since 1837, and the line moved faster than expected. Then for the rest of the trip people did their own taste tests at every café. By the end, the official count, kept on a napkin by a couple from Sugar Land, was 117 tarts across 14 people. We think that's low.

Sintra was in thick fog the morning we visited Pena Palace. It looked like something out of a fairy tale. Then the fog lifted around noon and it looked like a different fairy tale.

The biggest surprise was Nazaré. November is the start of big-wave season there, and we got lucky with a swell. We stood on the cliff by the lighthouse watching surfers get towed into waves that looked as tall as office buildings. A retired oil engineer from Katy stood there for an hour and didn't say a word.

Porto was the perfect ending. We toured three port lodges across the river in Gaia, and argued for two days about the francesinha, a sandwich layered with meats, covered in melted cheese and drowned in a beer sauce. Half the group called it the best thing they ate on the trip. The other half called it a cry for help.