We had originally planned to take the train to Braga mid-day, but we learned that a group we follow on YouTube, Expats Everywhere, was planning a meetup at a Porto hotel in the evening. So we got train tickets for 9pm so we could attend. We had already bought our mid-day tickets, but there were no refunds or changes that we could discover online, so we just didn’t use them. Train fares are inexpensive, especially for seniors, so it wasn’t a monetary issue. Maybe if we had visited a station, we could have exchanged, or at least have released our seats.
After checking out of our Home at Porto apartment and leaving our luggage in a locker in the entryway, we wandered around some new areas, short walks further up the hill toward the meetup destination. After lunch, we had a lot of extra time and were feeling tired, so we sat in a church park for a while, always checking out birds and enjoying the shade, then found the meetup location in a boutique hotel called Tipografia and Casa do Conto, two buildings on either side of an inner courtyard, converted into a 10-room hotel. The doors were locked when we first found it, but when we came back after 3pm, we saw action inside and knocked. We wanted to sit in the lobby until the meeting at 5:30pm. The manager graciously let us in and showed us to the inner courtyard where we could sit and work on writing and photos. We graciously bought drinks to justify our presence. After an hour or so, hotel guests came to the courtyard with its interesting old-style pool, including a German family with an amusing little boy who had to be deterred from splashing the pool water around.
After 5pm hotel guests left for whatever they were going to do, and meetup people started to arrive. After a year of watching Josh and Kaylie and their daughter Cia of Expats Everywhere on YouTube, it was fun to meet them. We chatted with various people, with longer conversations with someone who was just finalizing his purchase of a golden-visa property in Porto, and someone from Braga who we met up with later in Braga.
We left at 7pm and walked back to our apartment building, collected our stuff, and got an Uber to the train station. We had plenty of time and we could have stayed longer at the meetup, but we didn’t want to miss the last train to Braga. The main drawback to the late-evening train was that the sun set and we couldn’t see the countryside.
In Braga, we got a taxi at the train station for the very short ride to our apartment next to the Arco da Ponta Nova. The taxi waited while we figured out which door on which side of the square was our apartment. A waitress in a restaurant came out to help me examine one of the #19 buildings, but it was the #19 on the other side. Yay, we figured out how to get in and the taxi driver unloaded our bags. Everyone was very helpful, and the confusion was mainly because Pam didn’t know to lift a cover on the little box containing the keys so that she could enter the code.