Regua — Jim Winslett

Woke up today to rainy weather. We’ve managed to avoid the wet stuff so far on this trip, even though several times it’s poured down rain in the overnight hours.

Last night showed a threat of rain, however we still had some nice clear views of the Duoro while docked in Porto.

The morning rain wasn’t very heavy, though, so the views of the wine regions of Portugal were on full display, even through the rain.

The hills have all been terraced to make for easier harvesting.

The scenery was beautiful, but the real fun was going through the locks. First up was Lock Crestuma-Lever.

All the locks are just 12m (40ft) wide, which means our ship just barely fits into them.

Once inside the lock, the doors close behind us…

….then water fills the chamber, making the ship rise to the new level. The roof of the lock is low, so they have to lower the mast of the ship.

And they even lower the canopy over the deck seating. Once we were fully up at the new water level, it became obvious why they had to do these things.

From the upper portion, the lock looks almost serene.

Before long, we got to the second lock of the day: Lock of Carrapatelo, the highest lock in Europe. It’s massive.

Captain Silva didn’t seem phased by this at all, even though it was just as skinny as the previous one.

Going into such a tall, narrow chamber was surreal. It felt more like a sci-fi movie than a river cruise. The change in water level is more than 11 storeys!

The overhead clearance on this one would be even tighter than the last one. They didn’t just lower the deck canopy a little, they turned the chairs sideways and lowered it all the way down.

Then the crew folded down all the railings and Captain Silva abandoned the bridge. She triggered a switch that lowered the ceiling of the command bridge all the way down to the instrumentation, then she told us we had to get off the top deck for safety reasons.

Lunch was shortly afterward and then we pulled into the little town of Régua, which was having some sort of speedboat race going on.

There was a tour in the afternoon to some palace and gardens, but [1] it was still raining and [2] it was almost 5 hours long. We decided that being on a bus and with the cruise group for that long in the rain sounded a bit like purgatory, so we opted to skip it. Fewer than 10 people were left on the ship when the busses pulled away, which meant we nearly had the whole ship to ourselves! It was really nice.

We had some martinis and watched the vineyards go by on both banks of the river.

Eventually, we docked at another place and picked up everyone who had gone on the tour, just before sunset.

After dinner, there was a music trivia contest. Our team was the Canucks (of course) and for each of the nine songs, you had to name the title, artist, decade, and nationality of the singer. So there were four possible points for each of the nine songs. Oh, and you got 10 bonus points if you danced while they played it.