Since we rent apartments, grocery stores become an important part of our traveling existence. And I will admit, we are spoiled by the shopping in Spain. Their flagship store, El Corte Inglés, is simply a shopping delight. Everything you could possibly want plus things you had no idea you needed. Every trip there is great.

When we visited Lisbon in 2019, we stayed down in the older part of the city. There was a Corte Inglés higher up in the less touristy part of the city, but it made no sense to book a place by a grocery store when the things we wanted to see were down in the “cultural” part of town. So we booked where it made sense and dealt with the hunting and gathering.

The flagship grocery chain in Portugal is called “Pingo Doce” and our first experience with them was memorable, but not in a good way. Our first visit to Pingo was also our first exposure to the hills of Lisbon which made us question the intelligence of combining one of our signature “urban” vacations with a trek in the Himalayas. In short, the walk to the store was all uphill on a dirty street and the Pingo at the top was what you’d expect to find in a shabby student area – tired, poorly stocked, and crowded. We got what we needed and we got out, choosing to use smaller neighborhood bodegas to restock as needed.

When we decided to visit Porto, I did a little grocery store research and discovered that our closest options were all Pingos. We were lucky to get started when we arrived on Saturday with the bodega just outside our front door. But it didn’t have everything so today, after recovering from our morning climb down and up, we went out in search of the closest Pingo.

Everything in Porto is above wherever you happen to be. It’s a universal, immutable law. And the trip to Pingo proved it. The good news at the start was that the walk up our street, Rua Mounzinho da Siviera, was a long gradual ramp. That allowed us to get into a steady, slow rhythm without breaking into anaerobic intensity. Of course, the tourists in front of us occasionally broke our pattern, which required a short intensive interval to regain our speed. Everything was great until we passed the São Bento train station where we had to turn right and the grade went up to about 25%. We watch a lot of bike racing, and often marvel at the crazy goat trails the race organizers send the riders up. Today we walked up one of those. MLW was asking where we were going, I was relying on Google Maps that claimed the whole walk was only 18 minutes which was clearly a joke given that we were in the middle of a half-hour slog. Up and up we went, the only good news was that we weren’t doing it at 10,000 feet and there was plenty of air to gasp. I’m sure Google Maps did its calculation based on .75 miles on a level plain at 2.5 MPH, not .75 miles with a thousand feet of elevation at .9 MPH. However, just when I feared a divorce was imminent, Pingo appeared. And it was a great store. Well-stocked with everything we wanted, clean and well-lit. And the really good news – the walk back home was all downhill.

Having burned all our hill-climbing candles for today, we decided to forego the trek down to the river and find some food on the pedestrian street we’d discovered, right behind our apartment. It was dark when we went out, so reading the menus outside the restaurant required my iPhone flashlight. The going was slow because every other pedestrian was doing the same thing. After reading all of them, just like lunch, the last restaurant was the winner. Two more wonderful Douro wines, Beef Bourguignon for MLW and a lamb shank for me, both prepared with a Portuguese flair. Our meal was made better by a street musician playing a series of wind instruments accompanied by a canned music track. From Lionel Richie to Sergio Mendes, he was incredibly talented and a pleasure to listen to. He came by the outside tables to collect some tips when his set was over and stopped to talk to us, asking us where we were from. We told him “New Mexico” and then spent the next five minutes explaining that our state was nowhere near the ocean and that we had no beaches. I gave him a 5 and off he went.