I'd always wanted to visit the Douro valley. I'd always loved Douro wine you see, red wine matured in ok barrels, dry and delicious. If you come to Portugal, you see, you simply must - and the Douro river STARTS in Porto, where boats used to bring barrels of wine to the port to be shipped to England.

Funny, as Jamie hadn't even heard of it. I guess he always liked French and Italian wines, whereas I was always in love with Portugal from a short trip to Lisbon in 2001 where I sampled wine from the area and then could never get enough. It was dry and oaky from being aged in oak barrels.

The drive was enough to convince him. The N222 is an incredible road that's been voted as one of the best in the world - it has just the right amount of curves and hills, as well as views and emotional impact, to make the cut.

The area is the largest mountainous appellation wine growing region in the world. In some ways it's sad because every wild hill is now cut with terraces of grapevines.

Still, it's spectacular and on a far bigger scale that I had thought. We spent a lot of time saying WOW.

Many people get a boat tour all the way up from Porto, and you can even stay in a cabin. There's some five locks to get through as the valley rises through the country side. You can also see it by train. We were super happy to drive it however and felt we got the better experience.

We did stay one night in a vineyard for free, even doing their free wine tasting tour. We weren't that excited about their wines so we didn't buy any. However it was really great to learn the history of wine making in the area. Did you know that port was invented because when they shipped wine to England 300 years ago, it would go off? So they stopped the fermentation by adding brandy and voila - the English loved it. Jamie asked where the brandy came from and I don't think the guy was too happy to admit it came from France. They're also having a bit of an issue at the moment as the Russian market was huge but they're not allowed to export to Russia at the moment because of Ukraine.

Back in the day there's no way we could stay in wine yard without getting rolling drunk on what was on offer. However, we barely drink these days so we showed restraint 😊

From there we kept going to Sao Jao De Pesqueira, a small town that has supermarkets, restaurants and vineyards. I mean everyone had a vineyard because everyone sells grapes to the wine companies! We were here to meet Carlos, a friend of Paulo, who was also into Land Rovers. He took us out for a massive lunch, wine, port, and back to his apartment for more wine, cheese and various cured sausages and meats. He insisted on paying for everything!

Buttercup safely spent the night locked up in the shed at his vineyard amongst very expensive barrels of port!

Butters also tried to join the fire brigade. Carlos took us to the fire station as they had a Series Landrover and a few other cars there that they do up in their free time. It was a lot of fun talking to the bombeiros.

After that we tried to leave and climbed a massive hill along another amazing valley toward Villa Real, where Buttercup broke down. She made it okay downhill but Jamie had to nurse her on the ups which proved a stressful and instense couple of hours. But if there's one thing we know it's that you are better to be stuck in a beautiful place, so we headed back to the Douro valley.

We spent a night a free campsite at Regua, where there are three bridges. It was crazy noisy as they had won a local footy match so there were mad sirens and music and hooting. We got stuck there another day as we literally couldn't get out of the valley - the fuel wasn't getting through to get us up hill. Eventually Jamie found a spare parts store and a fuel filter did the job.

Even the drive out of the valley toward Amarante was incredible. Honestly it's one of the best roads we have ever done and I would do it again in a heart beat.

With Love,

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