Porto’s train station: history depicted in tile

As a traveler on the north side of 70, I don’t usually take advantage of the night life offered by any particular city. Not anymore, anyway.

Oh, I sometimes make exceptions when I’m in New York. A few years ago my wife Mary Pat and I took in a performance of the Aaron Sorkin stage adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Even though we skipped any post-show cocktails, something that would have been obligatory even a couple of decades ago, we still didn’t get back to our Brooklyn Airbnb until late.

Age tends to pose such limits on some of us, as it did continually on me throughout the trek through southern Spain and Portugal that Mary Pat and I made in late May – which I have been recounting here on Going Mobile for the past several weeks.

I last left off at the end of our first night in Porto, Portugal’s second-biggest city. I rose the next morning, as always first among our travel party (which now includes our Spokane friends Ann and Matt). That meant I was first to enjoy the basic breakfast offered by the Moov Hotel Porto Centro. I say “basic” because there were no eggs of any type on the menu. I say “enjoy” ironically because the only coffee came from machines.

But some caffeine is preferable to none at all. And after I hit the “brew” button on the machines a half-dozen times, I found enough energy to start the day. Once the others joined me, again just a few minutes before the friendly and gracious hotel employees began clearing the tables, a decision had to be made: how to spend the day that was set before us. Based on what we’d already experienced, we weren’t expecting much.

Then we had a common thought: Why not do what Mary Pat and I had done in Sevilla, as well as any number of other cities over the past several years, namely, buy tickets for Porto’s version of a Hop-on Hop-off Bus Tour ? We opted for the Blue Line, which extends beyond the city’s historic center and, by crossing the scenic Douro River, gives riders a good idea of just how important the river is to the city itself.

The tour, in fact, was well worth the 23 euros it cost each of us because it provides a far greater perspective on Porto, a city that Rick Steves – for one – charitably describes as “full of gritty, old-world charm,” of being “unpretentious” and of having “an endearing warts-and-all character.” All of that is no doubt code for, well, it’s no Lisbon, but there are things about Porto worth checking out.

One of those things is the São Bento train station . Although we didn’t travel to or from Porto by train, we did make a special trip to the station just to see the tiles that line the interior walls. The station, which opened in 1916, isn’t necessarily something special. But the tiles? It’s like stepping into an art museum, albeit one crowded with suitcase-carrying visitors, tinged as it is with the blue sheen of work created by the artist Jorge Colaçao depicting aspects of Portuguese history.

It makes for an impressive sight, especially when you consider that it adorns the walls of a place dedicated to community transit. As one website I found declaims, “Standing in the main hall of São Bento station is a bit like being inside a gigantic crockery cabinet. That’s not an experience you get very often on public transport, or anywhere else for that matter, making it a worthy entry onto the list of transport beauties.”

Another positive we experienced was the late lunch we enjoyed at Tapabento , a place recommended to Mary Pat by her former law student Sara and her husband Victor. Dubbed by someone on TripAdvisor as “The world’s best restaurant next to a train station,” Tapabento also features some of the friendliest hosts in any restaurant anywhere. Even though we arrived just minutes before the 3 p.m. closing time, we were shepherded to a booth and treated like mini-royals.

As the restaurant’s name implies, the specialties were tapas. And even though the dishes that we initially wanted were sold out (the penalty for last-minute arrivals), we liked what we did order: shrimp, oxtail dumplings, avocado toast, etc.

After walking back to the hotel, uphill all the way and mostly under a hot sun, we had little energy to do much more than plod one foot in front of the next and dream about our air-conditioned rooms. But the ensuing late-afternoon break allowed us to regain our strength, so that when Mary Pat made a dinner reservation for 8:30, we were again ready for whatever Porto had to offer.

It was at the restaurant Casa Ribeiro , while eating pizzas and caprese salads (with fresh burrata), that we had another personal encounter of the kind that makes travel so worthwhile. Our server, whose name I never caught, spoke perfectly accented American English. And when Matt, the language doyen, complimented her, she revealed that she was from Denver.

It turns out that she had been a missionary in Brazil, had met a man there and married him. They both had sought a better life in Portugal, and she was working in the restaurant and he was working construction with the idea that one day he – a talented chef, she said – would be able to open his own restaurant. We did our best to help them out by leaving a substantial tip.

Buoyed by her positive attitude, we stepped back out into the night, which had been cooled by a sudden shower. Then we headed, slowly, back to the hotel – where one of us would drift off to sleep with visions of Portuguese history being played out on the blue-tiled walls of Porto’s train station.

Next up : the town of 100-foot waves.