We’re on our Northern Portugal road trip. It’s a working trip for me and I worked the past two days. I had today off and we may have gone a little overboard, lol. We are staying in Barcelos, about 10-15 minutes outside of the city center. The house we’re staying in is nice and the property is beautiful, but we don’t really like the area. It’s good to know because Barcelos is in a great location and we were wondering if we would like it. Today we ventured into the city center, which is pretty, but I think the city has been ruined for us (at least for now) due to our first impressions.

The roads in the area we’re in are pretty bad. A lot of them are cobblestone and there are so many blind turns. It feels like every time we turn there is a mirror to help us see if cars are coming. There are some really awkward angles and turns to make. We have driven quite a bit around the Silver Coast and Lisbon area and I haven’t really seen roads like this anywhere else yet.

Before we moved to Portugal I read posts from expats complaining about the driving here. It has never bothered us. We lived in Florida for 7 years and the driving there is some of the worst I have seen. Portugal is much better than Florida driving. Well, in Barcelos we finally are experiencing some of other people’s complaints. In Barcelos we get tailgated no matter how fast we are driving. The speed limit, 10+ over really doesn’t matter. Someone will come along and tailgate you. And they get pretty close. It’s really frustrating and annoying.

Anyway, it has been a few days of that. Also the area we’re staying in is more run down than we have really seen. So we had been having a bad impression of Barcelos for a few days before we got to see the center. Like I said, the center is pretty nice, but Barcelos is not for us. And that’s okay.

After visitng the city center, we decided to head to Ponte de Lima because I have been excited to see it. I love it. It has moved to number one on my places I want to live list. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s going to work out because it seems really hard to find an apartment there, but we can try. We stumbled upon a huge festival there by accident. We’re going to return later this week, after the festival to get a better feel for the city. I’ll do a seperate blog post on Ponte de Lima after our second visit.

We went to Viana do Castelo last week, but we just saw an awesome playground and the mall, so we plan on returning there this week too. I’ll write a blog post about Viana after our second visit too. Tomorrow I think we are heading to Amarante. Kyle has been wanting to visit for a long time because it looks like a beautiful town.