You Can't Get There From Here


Our original itinerary was to pop over to the medieval town of Guimarães. We had heard it was a beautiful city with well-preserved buildings and beautiful views. We were especially looking forward to seeing Guimarães Castle and the palace of the Dukes of Bragança.

Unfortunately, the train schedules would not cooperate.  From Barcelos to Guimarães is only about 38 km by car. But we did not have a car.  The train is available just twice a day - at about 12:45 p.m. and at about 7 p.m.  The lunchtime train requires a change of trains in Nine, with a bit of a layover - thus the journey would take nearly 3 hours and 45 minutes.  The dinnertime train requires a change at Trofa with a shorter time between trains, as it clock in at about an hour and a half. It became clear to us that there was no way to get in a short visit to Guimarães en route to our next hotel in Braga. We opted to save the trip for another time and headed to Braga Thursday evening.


A bit of a langage difference

Barcelos to Braga is a short 20 km away... by automobile. By train, you must take a local train south to Nine and switch to a regional train headed back north to Braga. We purchased our tickets to Braga with no problems. The station agent spoke English, or at least her command of English was better than our Portuguese.  She told us "The train leaves in 3 hours and 23 minutes." Well, we were going to have a bit of time to kill, so we headed off to find a cafe with wifi.  Not many places fit that description at 2:30 p.m. that were within a comfortable walk of the station. (Remember, we are carrying everything we need for 5 days on our backs.)

We found a nice restaurant that was about to close for the hours between lunch and dinner, but they were happy for us to sit, sip coffee and share a dessert.

With little else to do, we headed back to the station to cool our heals.  Checking back in to see if the train was still on schedule, we were startled to learn that we had missed it! The station agent insisted that "the train leaves in 3 hours and 23 minutes" was the same as "the train leaves at 3:23."  

Could she reissue the tickets for the next train? No.
Would we need to purchase another set of tickets? No.

She suggested instead that we just board the next train to Nine with our expired tickets and perhaps the conductor would not mind. So we did. On the train the conductor glanced at our tickets, gave a little shrug and told us which platform to head to for the train from Nine to Braga.  

Life in Portugal is much less rule-driven than in the US.



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