Delivering training sessions about some of the destinations we’ve visited over the year prompts us to reflect on our experiences in a specific location; something which doesn’t always happen immediately after a trip as there’s nearly always somewhere else exciting to visit steaming toward us.

For a similar reason, I enjoy indulging myself with a round-up of the best, and worst, travel experiences from our year.

Biggest WOW of the year
No need to mull over this one, the herdsmen’s village of Velika Planina on a high plateau in Slovenia was the biggest travel surprise of the year. The photos we’d looked at beforehand didn’t prepare us for just how wowed we were when we actually saw it for ourselves. This is an exceptionally beautiful place. As well as being the biggest surprise, strolling around the village and eating buckwheat mush and sour milk outside a herdsmen’s hut was the most enjoyable travel experience of 2019.

Most beautiful destination
For years our nephew Liam has been raving about Zermatt in Switzerland. Finally we found out why. With the world covered by a thick snowy duvet, exploring Zermatt and surrounding countryside was like stepping into Christmas card scenes. Waking up to widescreen views of the Matterhorn each morning made sleepy eyes ping open with untypical enthusiasm. Greatest revelation was just how much fun following walking routes in thick snow can be.

The destination which disappointed
Last year Venice exceeded expectations, this year Florence failed to live up to them. The Florence north of the Arno didn’t charm for a variety of reasons – too many tour groups and grabby restaurants. A measure of a place is how long you want to spend there; our forays into the tourist hot spot across Ponte Vecchio were short-lived. It was simply too frantic. Thankfully, the south side of the Arno was a tranquil and charming contrast. Our experience of Florence was of a Jekyll and Hyde city.

Favourite city
Ljubljana isn’t the prettiest city we’ve visited but the feel-good factor was off the scale. We wandered with permanent smiles fixed to our faces. It’s a city with a big town feel so getting to know it doesn’t take much time. It’s a destination for anyone who enjoys good food, smooth wines, craft ales, and live music; a place to eat, drink, and be merry. After a day there, and some beer and wine, we declared it a place we could happily live.

Best hotel stay
Another category where there have been lots of contenders – Hotel Plesnik in Slovenia’s Logar Valley for its dream location; Hotel Agua Geres in Geres, Portugal, for being ultra comfortable and having excellent food after a tough day’s walking; Quinta Roja in Garachico, Tenerife, because it’s a favourite of ours; Oltrarno Splendid in Florence because it was actually splendid and as cool as Vincent Vega. Best though was Hotel La Laguna Gran in La Laguna, also Tenerife, as its lounge is a compelling blend of colonial and contemporary decor, it has a fabulous Michelin star restaurant, and the bar is of the sort which puts an arm around your shoulders and says “come on in, we’d love your company.”

Top nosh
There were so many excellent meals wolfed throughout the year, ranging from Michelin standard to quality street food, it would be unfair to single one out, so I’ve written a separate piece listing our favourite dishes of the year.

Send it back
The Etrop Grange near Manchester nearly came top as a) their already limited menu had even fewer options by the time we ate at 7.30pm and b) the chef managed to make fish and chips dull to the point I wasn’t tempted to pick at leftover chips (a really bad sign). But biggest culinary disappointment was at Mar e Sol in Sesimbra where the pez espada preto (scabbard fish) we’d told my mum would be meaty and tasty was mushy and bland, the worst pez espada we’ve eaten to date. Not that my mum cared, she was just happy to be sitting in the sun overlooking a gorgeous beach on a warm October day.

Exhilarating walking route of 2019
For having just the right level of challenging walking, boasting contrasting stop-us-in-our-tracks scenery, possessing an eclectic mix of ingredients (a mountain lake, sanctuary in a ravine, stone slab bridges), and just being loads of fun (a rare occasion of being able to walk with our friend and colleague from InnTravel, James) a route from Roucas to Peneda in Peneda-Geres National Park in Portugal ticked all the boxes which make for an exceptional hike. A difficult choice as all the routes we walked in Peneda-Geres were winners.

Most enjoyable transport
A cruise up the Douro River on a sizzling May day proved a scenic overdose as well as being a blast. The hills lining the river were hypnotic – their natural rolling curves artistically enhanced by the addition of narrow terraces of vines whilst the atmosphere on board ship was bizarrely booze cruise, but one mainly full of septuagenarian Portuguese. Why the nationality of partying pensioners made the experience more enjoyable rather than less so, I don’t know. But it did. It was an eclectically experience and the Douro lived up to the promise we’d seen in old films in a Port cellar in Porto.

Most emotional experience
The winter sun sparkling on blades of frosted grass; long, kilted shadows on a crisp forest path; a silhouetted lone piper playing a haunting lament; a roaring fire warming numbed legs; my nephew and his new bride wearing Cheshire cat-sized beams as they dodged a downpour of heart-shaped confetti. Scotland, you tug at my heart like no other destination.

Our mission was to introduce two of our Inntravel friends and colleagues, who didn’t know Portugal, to some of the highlights of their holidays here, as well as making a few minor improvements and picking up tips about their latest methods for writing precise walking route directions. This was also meant to showcase why Portugal is such a popular holiday destination. But not everything went exactly to plan.

Arrabida and the Setúbal Peninsula
It starts like a dream; cloudless skies and temperatures in late February which are warm enough for short sleeves, if you’ve just arrived from the north of England. Andy and I stick with long sleeves. We eat lunch at Santiago Fort on Sesimbra’s golden sands which are empty save for a couple of surfers. It’s ideal weather for an introduction to Arrabida Natural Park, the setting for a new Inntravel walking holiday. To give our colleagues a taster we set off on a circular walking route which starts in a small village. Within a few hundred metres our colleagues are stumped. Our directions don’t match the layout on the ground. We’re bemused as well. We walked it a couple of weeks previously and it was fine then, or so we thought. It makes us look totally incompetent, not really the impression we’d aimed for. The mystery is solved a couple of weeks later when we discover the Portuguese Army have been ‘rearranging’ the landscape to make tracks for fire trucks, precautions for tackling forest fires. It becomes a route which changes constantly over the following couple of months, until the soldiers finish the job. This sort of unexpected development is one of the perils of writing walking directions.

Heading north
The road north starts with Lisbon’s Vasco da Gama Bridge, a spectacular way to cross the Tagus. On the one side are salt pans, flamingos, and fishermen. On the other, one of the most exciting cities in Europe. Whilst the landscape north of Lisbon isn’t an industrial one, it is more urban than the road south to the Algarve. As well as eucalyptus forests and whitewashed villages hugging hillsides we pass curios, garish signs for escort motels and the funkiest looking football stadium built for Euro 2004. We swap the motorway for the coast just north of Coimbra, heading to Videira to take a look at the route of a cycling holiday.

The Venice of Portugal
In February, Videira has an out of season ambience. Yet another endless Portuguese beach is virtually empty of people. On the sands a bike leans against an old wooden cart on which fishing nets are piled high. We ponder if it has Slow Travel photo potential. From Videira we trace the holiday’s cycle route, passing the lively Atlantic and an endless beach on one side and long, glassy lagoons on the other. A highlight along the way is Costa Nova, looking more like a film set than a working town. Costa Nova sits on an anorexic strip of land (sand) between the Atlantic and the Aveiro Lagoon and attracts Portuguese visitors because of its picture-postcard-pretty striped clapperboard houses, formerly fishermen’s huts. Pleasing on the eye though Costa Nova is, it’s not the main attraction in the area. That title belongs to Aveiro, the Venice of Portugal, where barcos moliceiros (lagoon boats which are Aveiro’s version of gondolas) transport visitors through the town’s network of canals. We arrive after dark, but there’s enough light to point out a quirky feature of the barcos, their prows are painted with quasi-erotic scenes – saucy scenes you’d call them if this was 1972. Somehow I don’t think that particular insight will feature prominently in the marketing.

The Count and the Minho
Another day and another city to navigate. We skirt Porto to drop one of our Inntravel colleagues at Porto Airport before heading into ‘old’ Portugal and the Minho. As well as looking different from the Portugal to the south (it’s all green valleys, meandering rivers, and even hills) Minho feels different, in many ways it has more in common with northern Spain, unsurprisingly as the region borders Galicia.

On a route around Durrães we walk on a section of the Caminho de Santiago; eat pear-shaped coconut flavoured cakes on a Roman bridge; debate for a long time whether part of the route, a bridge now totally submerged under water, was ever a bridge or was always a weir; and encounter another of Portugal’s mysteriously changing landscapes where our walking directions don’t fit. Yet again, measures to prevent forest fires (they have become almost an obsession in Portugal, understandably, since the devastation of 2017) have resulted in changes to paths and the terrain. In fairness, it’s an even better walking route as a result.

After dinner we’re due to meet Francisco, Count of Calheiros, in his manor house where, like Inntravel customers who book this holiday, we’re staying. A meeting in Ponte de Lima keeps Francisco late in town. Pete from Inntravel has an early flight from Porto so it looks like he’ll miss getting to meet the incomparable Count. At around 10.30 there’s a knock on our bedroom door. Andy, who’s just wiped off her make up, answers it to find Count Francisco standing there, looking completely bemused as he asks “Peter?” I know Andy isn’t wearing any make up but I still think it’s a bit harsh to mistake her for a ‘Peter’. Francisco wanted to say hello/goodbye to Pete and didn’t know we’d swapped rooms when we arrived at the house.

Shaggy dog tale in the valley of gold
Now on our own, we travel south east to check walking directions in the Douro Valley, an area we’ve wanted to visit ever since we were captivated by a film we saw at Graham’s Port cellar in Porto. It showed life in the Douro vineyards and the landscape was beguiling – unusually sculpted hills curving alongside an olive river. We’re based in a dream of a rural hotel, Quinta de la Rosa just outside Pinhao. As well as being a small hotel on the banks of the Douro, it’s a working vineyard with a gourmet restaurant. Perfect. Or it would be if it wasn’t chucking it down.

On one of our three days there it’s so wet I don’t take my camera when we set off to check the route directions. In fact, the weather is so poor a farmer stops his pickup at one point and asks if we’d like a lift. As we take refuge from the rain in a bus shelter in a small town 10km from our hotel, I make the mistake of speaking to a shaggy dog who’s sharing the shelter with us. He decides, as we’re now clearly friends, to tag along for the rest of the route. Then he decides he’s our dog, sitting outside the building where our room is. Every so often I can hear staff asking “whose dog is this?” He follows us to dinner, and follows us back to the room again. He’s still there when we get up in the morning. Then he stares accusingly through the restaurant’s window at us as we eat breakfast. Not for the first time, we fret about how a dog who has attached itself to us is going to get back home. In the end I confess to reception staff about our furry little problem.
“Don’t worry,” one replies nonchalantly. “Dogs do this all the time. I’ll put a photo on facebook and someone will recognise him and come to collect him. Everybody knows everybody else around here.”
Although I feel reassured, as we take to the road to head for home I see a rejected little face in the rear-view mirror and feel guilty as hell. Andy bans me from ever talking to strange dogs we meet on the path in future. We both know that isn’t going to happen.

Our road trip lasted nine days and covered five very contrasting areas in the northern half of Portugal. As well as being diverse in terms of scenery and personality most have something else in common – none, apart from the Douro, are particularly well known outside of Portugal.

It’s barely 9 am and despite a lingering chill of night in the air beside the Douro River, the sun is already hot on my skin, causing minuscule beads of sweat to gather in my eyebrows. On the quayside, a group of woman selling straw hats is mingling with the waiting passengers. One of them quickly approaches me and offers me a hat. I decline and turn away.

Amongst the people milling around us, a group of around 30 are wearing matching blue baseball caps with the words Douro Azul embroidered on them, perched incongruously on grey heads. One of the baseball cap wearers is holding a wooden pole at the top of which is a platform on which three carved figures stand, two naked men flanking a naked woman, their arms and the two penises raising up and down in response to a loud clacking mechanism in the handle operated by the carrier. As he strolls through the crowd towards us, his face a beaming beacon of delight in his role of group comedian, I stare, rudely, making no attempt to contain my annoyance at his puerile, tasteless trophy.

I sigh, exasperated at the delay. We were supposed to be on the quayside at 8:45 am, ready for a prompt departure at 9 am. At 8:45 am we were still standing outside our hotel, a twenty minute drive away, waiting for a taxi we had ordered the day before. By the time he arrived, my face told the driver he was in trouble and he set off at speed, hurling the car around the hairpin bends that swept down through vineyards to the river, arriving alongside the quay just as the railway station clock struck nine. Now it’s ten past nine, the boat is anchored alongside the quay and the crew are only now putting the gangplank in place. All that stress for nothing.

Another woman approaches me, holding out a straw hat.
“Nao.”
She tries a different hat.
“Nao!” I give a speak-to-the-hand gesture and turn away, aware that my voice has been too loud, too aggressive, incongruous amongst the excitement and anticipation of the waiting passengers.
I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve made a big mistake booking this cruise.

Several weeks earlier we had spent two days walking in the Douro Valley, in rain of Biblical proportions. Most of the time we could barely see the path in front of us but once or twice, just for a few precious moments, the sun had emerged and we had seen the beauty around us. It was enough to tempt us to return and to take a cruise up-river where we had heard, the best landscapes lay.

Boarding finally begins and as we reach the gangplank, we’re told our table is number 105 on the first deck. Expecting to have to share a table and desperately hoping that the old guy with the tacky adult toy isn’t sharing with us, I make my way down the cabin to table 105 and am delighted to find it’s set just for the two of us. Things are looking up.

The cruise includes breakfast, and each place setting has a plate with a bread roll and a piece of cake. A jug of orange juice sits on each table, along with a saucer containing packets of butter and strawberry jam. As the waiting staff begin pouring coffee, we tuck into our roll and cake and I begin to relax and take in my fellow cruise passengers. The vast majority appear to be Portuguese, with a smattering of French and German. As far as I can hear, there are no other native English speakers amongst the mêlée of voices. On the whole, people are dressed as they might be for a Sunday picnic after Mass, many of the women sporting one of the straw hats I had so curtly refused.

Once breakfast is done, people begin to wander out on deck and we join them, heading to the top deck and taking a couple of seats in the sun. It’s at this point that I remember we haven’t applied any sunscreen, in fact, we didn’t even bring any with us. Our mini-break weather up until today has been so bad that I haven’t even thought about sunscreen – until now. I rummage in my rucksack and find a stick of sun block which we both apply to our faces. The woman sitting next to Jack offers us her sunscreen to use but before I can say ‘obrigada’, Jack politely refuses it.
“You had better get your hat on then,” I caution through pursed lips.
“I haven’t brought it.”
We’re on deck, at the very start of a 12 hour river cruise, the sun is blazing in a cloudless sky and we have no sunscreen and one hat between us.

But we’re gliding gracefully along the Douro, the bridges and houses of Regua giving way to layer upon layer of slopes braided in vines as the river narrows and the banks draw closer, embracing us in their unbridled beauty. It isn’t long before we reach our first lock and the gate opens for us to slide into the chamber, a cascade of water falling from it, creating a curtain of rain which passes along the deck like a rumour, eliciting squeals and whoops from the passengers as the cold droplets spatter indiscriminately down backs.

Suddenly I get it, the sense of camaraderie with fellow passengers; the joy of a journey up-river to places as yet unseen; a shared adventure and a forced relaxation. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do, except enjoy the experience and the extraordinary landscape that’s being unwrapped, like a game of ‘pass the parcel’ except the music doesn’t stop and we all win the prize.

After a while we decide to give our seats to a couple of the elderly women who have been left standing as there are more passengers than there are seats on the upper deck. We head to the shade of the lower deck and watch from the stern as the river carries us gently through its valley. As midday approaches we can hear the clatter of crockery and cutlery below deck and watch the waiting staff setting tables for lunch. Once again we head to our table where a bottle of red wine and a large bottle of water await, not to mention the aperitif of either a port or a porto tonico (white port with tonic) which we happily guzzle. I’m amazed that we get a whole bottle of wine to ourselves, there’s only one bottle on each table, most of which have eight people at them but as lunch progresses, hands are raised and more bottles are brought to replenish supplies.

By the time dessert arrives, the volume of merriment below decks has risen exponentially. Its fair to say fun is being had. Coffee replaces wine glasses, and the strains of an organ rise from below deck. An intrepid exploration to the lower deck uncovers a keyboard player and a packed dance floor. It’s a level of fun too far for us. We head to the deck where the sun is now beating mercilessly, there’s an intermittent hint at a breeze, and the scenery has morphed from dramatic to sublime. A medley of pop music is drifting across the heads of the passengers, lulling everyone into a post-lunch euphoria as we cruise.

In front of us, three women are dressed in summer dresses and each is wearing one of the straw hats bought from the vendors at the quayside. As I look at them I realise that they’re actually quite pretty hats. Jack is wearing my hiking hat and my head is hot. As much as I want to stay here all afternoon, I realise it won’t be long before I’ll have to head inside to the shade. I want to go back in time to this morning and replay it. In my new version we arrive happy and stress-free at the quayside where I buy one of the pretty straw hats from a vendor and laugh at the old guy in the baseball cap with his crude toy.

The afternoon passes gently by and we finally dock at Barca D’Alva and disembark, all smiles and sun-kissed faces. Transferring to a coach, we thread our way above the valley, looking down on the river we’ve sailed as we wind up and over the hills to Pocinho and the panoramic, riverside train ride back to Regua. It has been the most perfect, well almost, day.

Douro Cruising
We took our Regua – Barco D’Alva – Regua cruise with Tomaz Do Douro, one of several companies offering a range of cruises on the Douro. Our cruise cost €106 per person and included breakfast and lunch (incl. wine & water) on board, bus from Barca D’Alva to Pocinho and train from Pocinho to Regua, arriving back at 8:30pm.