Obrigado, Not Gracias: Cuisine and Culture in Portugal

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View over Lisboa rooftops to the Castelo de São Jorge
Lisboa from the Miradouro da Senhora do Monte: terracotta roofs tumbling down toward the Tagus, with the Castelo de São Jorge on the far hill. Seven hills, they say. My knees counted more.

Our trip to Portugal began with a free show. Somewhere over (probably) Greenland, on the overnight flight from San Francisco to Amsterdam, the sky outside the window turned green and started to ripple. The aurora borealis is on a lot of bucket lists. We crossed it off without leaving our seats, which sets a very high bar for the rest of a vacation.

Aurora borealis seen from an airplane window over Greenland
The aurora borealis over (probably) Greenland, through an airplane window. The pink orbs are lens flare from the wingtip light, not alien escorts. The airline did not charge extra.

Portugal cleared it anyway.

There were six of us, a family affair, and we picked the destination the honest way: we laid everyone’s calendars side by side and looked for the place that fit the gap. None of us had ever been to Portugal. One of us had never been to Europe at all. It turned out that we had brought a surprising amount of expertise along. Our son is a sommelier and the beverage manager at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Our daughter is an interior designer who cannot walk past a sconce without forming an opinion. Another of us designs and builds custom furniture, and another has a career in sports medicine. Most of us consider ourselves foodies. (Our daughter and the furniture-maker could only stay a week, since he had a business to get back to, so they flew home on our second morning in Porto. The rest of us carried on eating in their honor.) So we saw the same country through six different sets of professional eyes. Mostly those eyes were looking at dinner.

Two story arcs emerged. The first is linguistic: I speak Spanish reasonably well, and I assumed that would carry me through Portuguese. It did not. Portuguese takes Spanish, runs it through Lewis Carroll’s vorpal blade (snicker-snack!), and hands back something that looks familiar and sounds like a Spaniard talking through a mouthful of pastry. The second arc is culinary, and it ends with me, a man who never had much use for port, developing a sincere and somewhat expensive appreciation for 20-year-old Tawny.

The verdict up front: to a person, the Portuguese were friendly, warm, and accommodating, and the food was extraordinary. We would go back tomorrow.

About the images: I reserve all rights to use of these images for any commercial purpose. You may use them as backgrounds or wallpaper for your personal use, but any other use requires a license. Unattributed Images were taken by Steven Christenson with a Samsung S24 Ultra phone unless otherwise noted. Most other images were taken on iPhones.

The Itinerary: Two Weeks, South to North

Our travel agent, Betty Hazle of Los Gatos Travel, put the itinerary together with help from Titanium Tours in Portugal. We flew into Lisboa and worked our way north to Porto, with the Douro Valley as a detour inland:

  • Lisboa, staying at the Hotel do Chiado
  • Sintra day trip: Pena Palace, the Moorish Castle, and the wild Atlantic coast
  • Peniche (en route north): a fortress with a dark history
  • Óbidos, sleeping inside the castle at the Pousada do Castelo
  • Nazaré (en route): big-wave capital of the world
  • Mealhada (en route): lunch in a town that runs on roast suckling pig
  • Porto, staying at Wine & Books, with a day in the Douro Valley
Illustrated map of our route through Portugal, from Lisboa north to Porto and the Douro Valley, with sketches of each stop
Our route, south to north: Lisboa, Sintra, Peniche, Óbidos, Nazaré, Mealhada, Porto, and a day trip up the Douro. Click to enlarge.

A word on names. The Portuguese call their capital Lisboa, which English speakers have flattened into “Lisbon.” I prefer the native name, so it’s Lisboa from here on. You’ve been warned.

Lisboa: Landing in the Middle of Town

The approach into Lisboa is unnerving. The airport sits inside the city, so the final descent goes over rooftops, apartment balconies, and laundry lines, close enough that you start to wonder whether the runway is a boulevard. It is not. But it’s a near thing.

The 25 de Abril Bridge over the Tagus from the air, with Almada on the far bank
The 25 de Abril Bridge from the plane on approach.

Before landing we got a gift of a view: the 25 de Abril Bridge stretching across the Tagus. Anyone from the San Francisco Bay Area does a double take. It’s painted the same International Orange as the Golden Gate, and it was built by the same company that built the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, which it closely resembles. It’s also much younger than either: it opened in 1966 as the “Salazar Bridge,” named for the dictator, and was renamed after the 1974 Carnation Revolution that ended his regime. The bridge got a train deck in 1999. The Golden Gate is still waiting. It looks like a San Francisco bridge that moved to Europes because it more or less is.

The San Francisco comparisons don’t stop at the bridge. Lisboa is called the “City of Seven Hills” (San Francisco makes the same claim), and the hills come with stairs. Lots of stairs. The view from the Miradouro da Senhora do Monte, looking across terracotta roofs to the Castelo de São Jorge, is worth every one of them.

Belém: Monks, Monuments, and the Original Custard Tart

Jerónimos Monastery cloister seen through a carved arch
The Jerónimos Monastery cloister, framed by one of its own arches. Construction started in 1501 and took most of the century. Nobody was in a hurry, and it shows.
Belém Tower with a wooden walkway and visitors
The Belém Tower. It was built to defend Lisboa from ships. These days the main threat is selfie sticks.

Belém, at the western edge of the city along the river, is where Portugal keeps its Age of Discovery greatest hits. The Jerónimos Monastery is a riot of carved limestone in the Manueline style: ropes, sea creatures, armillary spheres, and arches carved so finely they look like lace. It’s the kind of handwork that makes a modern craftsman, like the furniture-maker in our group, wince at the thought of quoting the job.

A short walk away is the Belém Tower, a 16th-century fortress that guarded the mouth of the Tagus and now guards a long line of tourists waiting to climb it.

Box from Pastéis de Belém
The box says “desde 1837.” The tarts inside did not survive to 1838, or to the end of the afternoon. (Photo by a fellow traveler.)

And then there are the pastries. Pastéis de Belém has been baking pastéis de nata, the famous Portuguese custard tarts, since 1837, from a recipe said to come from the monks of Jerónimos next door. The recipe is still a closely guarded secret. The tarts are flaky, blistered on top, faintly lemony, and dangerous in groups of six. They usually come with a shaker of cinnamon to dust on top, and, boy, is that the way to eat them. Powdered sugar is the alternative, and purists go bare. Every bakery in Portugal sells pastéis de nata; only this one is allowed to call them pastéis de Belém.

We tried them at various shops (after copious research and a free and fair election, we awarded second place to Manteigaria). They appeared in our hotel room. They appeared at every breakfast buffet, everywhere. We ate them all, strictly for comparison purposes. That’s called research.

Entretanto: Meanwhile, on the Roof

Our hotel, the Hotel do Chiado, has a rooftop bar called Entretanto, which means “meanwhile” or “in the meantime.” It’s the perfect name for a place where you wait for the sun to go down, and we did a lot of waiting there. The view takes in the Lisboa Cathedral, the red rooftops of the Baixa, and the river beyond, and the sunsets were consistently beautiful.

Sunset over the Lisboa Cathedral and Tagus River from the Entretanto rooftop bar
Sunset from the Entretanto rooftop, with the Sé (Lisboa Cathedral) in the middle distance, shot with the 5x telephoto. Meanwhile, the charcuterie arrived.

The charcuterie at Entretanto was excellent, but the surprise of the trip was a plate of tempura-fried green beans. They’re called peixinhos da horta, “little fish from the garden,” because the battered beans look like small fried fish. Portuguese Jesuits are credited with bringing this batter-frying technique to Japan in the 1500s, where it eventually became tempura. So we were eating tempura’s great-grandparent, on a roof, in the city where it was born. It was fantastic.

A City That Speaks Up

A large protest march in a Lisboa street

We saw three protests while we were in Portugal. Lisboa had a housing protest and a march for Palestine that stretched for many, many blocks. All three were peaceful while we were there. After we left, that changed (more on that in the Porto section). Portugal’s housing squeeze is real (rents and home prices have far outpaced local wages, and short-term rentals and foreign buyers get much of the blame), and the people affected are not being quiet about it.

Sintra: The Disneyland of Portugal

Pena Palace sits on a peak above Sintra, and it looks like a castle designed by a committee of children with unlimited paint. It’s yellow, red, and gray; it has Moorish arches, Gothic turrets, Manueline windows, and domes. King Ferdinand II built it in the mid-1800s as a Romantic fantasy, and it succeeds magnificently.

Pena Palace with its yellow and red towers seen from below through palm trees
Pena Palace, Sintra. King Ferdinand II built it in the 19th century and appears to have had all the colors and all the architectural styles on hand.

It is also the Disneyland of Portugal, complete with Disneyland lines and Disneyland crowds. As we shuffled along with several thousand of our closest friends, we were offered this comfort: “This is not the worst it gets.”

Crowds walking under a tiled arch at Pena Palace
The entry gate, with the crowd for scale. We were assured this was not the worst it gets. George, the man standing here was our jeep driver and guide.
The Triton window at Pena Palace: a stone sea monster holding up a bay window
The Triton Window: a half-man, half-fish holding up the building on his head, surrounded by coral and seashells. Try commissioning that from a contractor.
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The palace is still worth it. Buy your timed tickets in advance, go early, and try to enjoy the people-watching. From the terraces you can look down on the Castelo dos Mouros, the Moorish Castle, its walls snaking along the ridge for more than a thousand years. On a clear day you can see the Atlantic.

From Sintra we went down to the coast by Jeep through backroads, where the Atlantic batters a line of cliffs with real enthusiasm. The Praia da Adraga has a natural rock arch that frames the surf like a picture window. Down the coast, a lighthouse marks Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point of mainland Europe. Next stop: the United States, eventually.

A natural rock arch framing breaking waves on a beach
The sea arch at Praia da Adraga, near Sintra. The Atlantic is putting on a show. The beach doesn’t have a gift shop, which is refreshing after Pena.
Rugged Atlantic cliffs and sea stacks, with a distant lighthouse
The coast near Cabo da Roca. The lighthouse on the far headland marks the westernmost point of mainland Europe.

Peniche: Where the Jokes Stop

Close-up of names engraved in a rusted steel memorial
Names of the political prisoners held at Peniche, engraved in weathered steel at the entrance to the National Museum of Resistance and Freedom.

Peniche is a fishing town on a peninsula north of Lisboa, best known today for surfing. Its waterfront fortress has a darker past. From 1934 to 1974 it was the most notorious political prison of the Salazar dictatorship. Opponents of the regime were held there, interrogated, and isolated. In 1960, a group of prisoners including the Communist Party leader Álvaro Cunhal escaped in the largest breakout in the prison’s history.

Today it houses the National Museum of Resistance and Freedom. At the entrance stands a large rusted-steel memorial engraved with the names of the people who were imprisoned there. The rust seems deliberate. Freedom in Portugal is only 52 years old, and a great many people still remember the alternative.

The ramparts of the Peniche fortress above the Atlantic
The ramparts of the Peniche fortress. It’s a beautiful setting for an ugly chapter of history.

Óbidos: Sleeping in a Castle

Óbidos is a perfectly preserved medieval village of whitewashed houses with blue and yellow trim, completely encircled by its castle walls. In 1282, King Dinis gave the town to his bride, Queen Isabel, as a wedding present, and it remained the property of Portuguese queens for centuries. It’s still sometimes called the Vila das Rainhas, the Town of Queens.

The castle of Óbidos with crenellated towers under a blue sky
The castle of Óbidos, now the Pousada do Castelo. For two nights we lived inside one of those towers.
The whitewashed courtyard and stone stairs of the Pousada do Castelo at dawn

We stayed inside the castle. The Pousada do Castelo is a hotel built into the old fortress, and our room was in one of the towers. Its window was a balistraria, an embrasure: a narrow slit in a thick stone wall, designed so archers could shoot out while nobody could shoot in. This makes for an excellent defensive position and a somewhat limited view. The staff couldn’t have been nicer, and they gave us two restaurant recommendations that turned out to be among the best meals of the trip (more on those below).

The walls of Óbidos are walkable, and the evening light on them is gorgeous. They’re also narrow, uneven, and in many places have no railing on the town side. It’s a full-contact medieval experience. Watch your step.

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Nazaré: The Biggest Waves in the World

Nazaré is a fishing town with a reputation out of all proportion to its size: off its headland, an undersea canyon focuses winter swells into some of the largest waves ever surfed, more than 80 feet. October is the start of the big-wave season. We did see big waves, though not the monsters, and through a thick fog that made them sound bigger than they looked.

Nazaré, in the fog. These are the big waves, not the monster waves, and they sound even bigger than they look.
The Atlantic and Nazaré's long beach seen from the clifftop lookout in haze
The view north from the clifftop lookout at Sítio. Somewhere out there in the haze is the undersea canyon that builds the giant waves.
The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Nazaré on a sunny plaza
The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Nazaré in the clifftop Sítio district. According to legend, the Virgin Mary stopped a knight’s horse at the edge of the cliff in 1182. The view from that cliff still stops people.

The upper town, the Sítio, sits on a cliff high above the beach. Its sanctuary commemorates a legend in which a nobleman named Dom Fuas Roupinho was chasing a deer in the fog, and the Virgin Mary stopped his horse at the very edge of the cliff. We took a more conventional route to the lookout, which I’d recommend.

Nazaré is also where I had my first sighting of a Portuguese treat whose name, to American ears, sounds like a bathroom joke: farturas. They’re fat, fried, sugared spirals of dough, like an oversized churro and sometimes filled. I promise they taste much better than they sound. Hold that thought; they come back at the most expensive dinner of the trip.

Mealhada: The Town That Runs on Pig

Between Óbidos and Porto lies Mealhada, a town in the Bairrada wine region that seems to serve one thing: leitão, roast suckling pig, crackling-skinned and peppery. Restaurant after restaurant along the main road advertises the same specialty, and nobody seems to mind. We stopped at Rei dos Leitões (“King of the Suckling Pigs”), which has been roasting them since 1947 and is listed in the Michelin Guide. This was not on the itinerary. Pedro, our host at Nova Casa de Ramiro in Óbidos, insisted we stop there, and after the meal he’d served us we weren’t about to argue. So we paid for an extra hour and a half of detour and bought lunch for our driver, Gustavo, who was a prince about the whole thing.

A long table set for lunch in the dining room of Rei dos Leitões, with a wall of wine bottles in oval niches
Our table at Rei dos Leitões in Mealhada. The wine bottles behind it are a small fraction of the list.

The pig was everything it was promised to be: crackling, crispy skin over a creamy layer of fat, and tender meat underneath. The surprise was the wine list, which was less a list than a Sears catalog. With a sommelier at the table, nobody was complaining. I don’t remember which wine we ordered. It was local, and it was delicious, which is probably all you need to know about Bairrada wine.

The Douro Valley: Where Port Comes From

The Douro Valley is one of the oldest demarcated wine regions in the world (1756) and a UNESCO World Heritage landscape: steep terraced vineyards stacked up the sides of the river canyon like the contour lines of a topographic map. It’s where the grapes for port are grown, and it is breathtaking. We took an all day trip (by car) through the region, and it included a one hour boat trip along the Douro river.

Here you see two different styles of terracing in the steep terrain. Narrow terraces, and very narrow vertical plantings. We saw similarly vertically challenged vineyards along the Rhine river – but these were even taller and steeper!

In the Douro we visited Mãos e Irmãos, where the winemaker, Rafael Ribeiro, was our host. Visiting a winery with a sommelier is a little like visiting a museum with an art historian: you see twice as much and understand three times as much. Oddly, the grounds themselves are fairly nondescript, but the view over the valley is lovely, and the real attraction was Rafa himself. They grow all the crops used in the restaurant on site, including the animals. He had many amusing things to say, and he insisted that I actually drink every pour rather than taste and dump. I believe the plan was to taste six wines. I’m fairly sure it ended up being eight. Possibly more. My notes get less reliable toward the end. Rafa’s hospitality and our son’s enthusiasm made it a thoroughly wonderful experience. Rafael also gave us restaurant recommendations, many of them, and every single one was awesome. That’s how we found Tascö in Porto (more on that below).

Somewhere between the Douro and the port lodges of Gaia, the second story arc reached its climax. I’d always thought of port as sweet, syrupy stuff that comes out at the end of a dinner party, mainly because I’d only ever had the cheaper ruby kind. Twenty-year-old Tawny is a different animal. It spends decades in wooden casks, slowly oxidizing, until it tastes of toasted nuts, caramel, dried figs, and orange peel. It’s smooth, complex, and only as sweet as it needs to be. I was converted. The Port tasting experience was at two locations along the Douro River. Most notable was: Quinta das Carvalhas. Sadly, I didn’t bring any home. My wallet, for reasons that have nothing to do with port, still hasn’t forgiven me.

Porto: The Ancient San Francisco

If Lisboa reminded us of San Francisco, Porto is San Francisco, if San Francisco had been around for 2,000 years and not bothered to flatten anything. The city tumbles down steep hills to the Douro River in a jumble of tiled façades, church towers, and staircases. There are cable cars (well, a funicular), there are hills that make Nob Hill look like a speed bump, and across the river in Vila Nova de Gaia there are the port lodges, which San Francisco would kill for.

Panorama of Porto and the Dom Luís I bridge over the Douro
Porto from across the river in Gaia. The two-level iron bridge is the Dom Luís I, completed in 1886 and designed by Théophile Seyrig, who had been Gustave Eiffel’s business partner. You can tell.

Our walking tour covered about 4.5 miles. I didn’t turn on the GPS tracker until we were about ¾ of a mile in. The track shows where we went, and the places where it lingers and wobbles are where we went inside churches, bookstores, and train stations, which GPS satellites can’t see into.

Porto walking tour track, October 17, 2026 (tracking began about ¾ mile in) • StarCircleAcademy.com

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A long line of people waiting outside Livraria Lello
The line for people who didn’t book ahead. Our 10:00 timed entry let us walk past the hundreds already waiting. (The ticket price is credited toward a book purchase.)

Livraria Lello, opened in 1906, is often called the most beautiful bookstore in the world, and it may be. The ornate ceilings, the stained-glass skylight, and the famous red forked staircase look like something out of a fantasy novel. They’re also not what they seem. The “carved wood” ceilings are actually painted plaster, and the curving staircase, which looks like it was whittled from a single enormous tree, is reinforced concrete. The illusion is so good that most visitors never suspect. That resemblance is the source of a persistent rumor that J.K. Rowling, who lived in Porto in the early 1990s, used Lello as the inspiration for Hogwarts. Rowling has said that she never set foot in the place. This has not shortened the line at all.

The ornate carved ceiling, skylight, and staircase inside Livraria Lello
Inside Livraria Lello. Our furniture-maker flew home that very morning and missed it. He would have been impressed, and then relieved to learn that most of what looks like carved wood is painted plaster.

We spent the better part of 90 minutes inside Lello. Skipping the line didn’t mean skipping the crowd; inside, it was wall-to-wall people. The craftsmanship alone, wood or not, is worth the elbowing. Just outside is the Clérigos Tower, a baroque bell tower that has been Porto’s landmark since 1763.

Gold, Tiles, and Towers

Lúcia noted that over 200 kg of gold is layered over the São Francisco church.

The Igreja de São Francisco looks like an ordinary Gothic church from the outside. Inside, nearly every surface is carved wood covered in gold leaf. Photos aren’t allowed, but somehow I have one. Down the hill, São Bento Station is a working railway station whose entrance hall is lined with about 20,000 hand-painted blue-and-white azulejo tiles by Jorge Colaço, depicting battles, royal weddings, and country life. Every train station should be like this. None are.

We ended the tour at the Majestic Café on Rua de Santa Catarina, an Art Nouveau café from the 1920s with carved wood, mirrors, and cherubs. It’s an interior designer’s playground, and ours had flown home that morning. She would have loved it.

The baroque Clérigos Tower above trees
The Clérigos Tower, about 250 feet of 18th-century baroque. It was once the tallest structure in Portugal. You can climb it, if you still have knees.
The baroque façade of the Igreja da Trindade in Porto
The Igreja da Trindade, just behind City Hall. In Porto you can’t walk a block without a church, a staircase, or both.

The Portuguese Massage

Early in the trip, one of our party had a stumble in Lisboa that left a knee unhappy, so by Porto we were taking a lot of Ubers. The rides were short (usually less than a mile) and cheap. They were also strangely long relative to the actual distance: thanks to the narrow, one-way streets, the walking distance was often about a quarter of the driving distance. The catch is that the walk is usually straight up a hill. Many of the turns are so tight that our drivers had to stop, back up, and try again.

And every driver, without exception, had the same name for the cobblestone streets: the “Portuguese massage.” Our knees did not give them a good review.

A vintage tank on a cobblestone plaza in Porto
A tank parked on the cobblestones near the Carmo church in Porto, part of an Army recruiting display. It was getting the Portuguese massage for free.
A protest encampment of tents under hand-painted banners in Porto
The housing protest encampment in Porto. The big banner at left does the math: median salary €1,000, rent on a one-bedroom €950, and then bills, groceries, and transport. Its verdict: Défice de noção!, roughly “A deficit of common sense!”

Porto had its own housing protest: an encampment of tents beneath hand-painted banners. The large white one at left lays out the household budget for half the population: a median salary of €1,000 against €950 for a one-bedroom apartment, €110 for utilities, €256.26 for a basic basket of groceries, and €75 for transportation. After that come health and education, culture and sport, savings, and taxes, each followed by a question mark. Other signs read Isto não acabou (“This isn’t over”) and − Bastão + Habitação (“Less baton, more housing”), the baton being the police kind. One spelled out, one letter per little house, Luís, quem é o egoísta? (“Luís, who’s the selfish one?”), presumably aimed at Prime Minister Luís Montenegro. The long black banner across the front declared A rua não tem medo da retaliação, “The street is not afraid of retaliation.” Another quoted Uma Casa Portuguesa, the beloved Amália Rodrigues fado about a humble Portuguese home with its “four whitewashed walls.” That’s a pointed reference when you can’t afford the four walls. A third offered the philosophy that “violence is the only argument of ignorance.” A hand-lettered cardboard sign said Não passarão, “They shall not pass”: the Portuguese version of ¡No pasarán!, the rallying cry of the Spanish Civil War, which this Spanish speaker had no trouble translating. A more radical banner urged passersby to “live communism, spread anarchy,” which was a striking insight given what I learned about the rise of communism in Eastern Europe in our previous trip. Nobody particularly wanted what communism brought them (oppression and loss of freedom) – but everyone desperate for food, housing, a job and security wants something they hope is better.

It was peaceful while we were there, but it didn’t stay that way. In the early hours of October 25, a few days after we flew home, police moved in with batons to clear the housing camps in both Lisboa’s Rossio Square and Porto’s Praça D. João I, the square in our photo. Police reported 31 arrests for disobedience; a spokeswoman for the Porto camp reported 37 minor injuries. The protesters are asking for a reversal of the new tenancy law, an end to evictions of people with nowhere else to go, limits on purchases by real-estate funds, rent caps, and the rehabilitation of vacant buildings. They say they’ll be back. In hindsight, “Less baton, more housing” and “The street is not afraid of retaliation” read less like slogans than forecasts. (Euronews has the story.)

Black Capes and Busking

Porto is a university town, and you can’t miss the students. They wear the traje académico: black suits and long black capes that make them look like a convention of young wizards. (Yes, local legend credits them as an inspiration for Hogwarts, too.) In the evenings, groups of them roamed loudly through the streets near our hotel and the square where the Army was recruiting, which made for an interesting combination. It was the start of the academic year, when the praxe, the initiation rituals for first-year students, is in full swing. During the day the same black capes turned up busking all over town, singing and playing for spare change. Uni is expensive everywhere.

Culinary Highlights: An Eating Tour Disguised as a Vacation

With a sommelier in the family and a table of six self-described foodies, we didn’t so much eat our way through Portugal as conduct a survey. We picked restaurants partly from research but mostly from recommendations: hotel staff, guides, bartenders, a winemaker. The recommendations won. Here are the results, in order.

Mãos e Irmãos – featuring Rafael Ribeiro. Photo by Rachel Ward

1. Mãos e Irmãos, Douro Valley. Ask my wife, ask our son, ask me: this was the best experience of the trip, and the meal was a big part of it. Rafa’s generous pours are described above in the Douro Valley section, above. The meal that came with the wine deserves its own spot at the top of this list. My wife tried the chicken gizzards (moelas) – in part because Rafa didn’t say what they were until we were eating them. To her own astonishment, she enjoyed them. If a winemaker can make a gizzard convert out of someone, imagine what he can do with a glass of wine.

(For completeness: there was also one restaurant in Lisboa so forgettable that I’ve already forgotten it. That’s the review. It did have some interesting decor, however!)

2. Nova Casa de Ramiro, Óbidos. If Mãos e Irmãos was the best experience, this was, for me, the best meal of the entire trip. It was recommended by the staff at the Pousada do Castelo, and it’s run by the proprietor, Pedro, with his wife and daughter. The food was superb, the welcome was even better, and by the end of the evening we were posing for a group photo with the family under the Portuguese royal coat of arms. I had a pork dish in a ginger sauce. Our son, who has eaten a great deal of steak (professionally and otherwise), ordered the steak and declared it in the top 3 best steaks he has ever eaten. Coming from him, that is not a casual remark. This restaurant is just outside the walls of inner Óbidos.

A group selfie of diners and hosts at Nova Casa de Ramiro
The whole gang at Nova Casa de Ramiro in Óbidos, with Pedro (the proprietor at left), his wife, and his daughter (at right). It was the best meal of the trip, and the only one that ended in a group photo.

3. Cozinha das Flores, Porto. This was the best meal we had in Porto. Our son found it, and the bartenders at Curioso confirmed it (see below). It is the restaurant of chef Nuno Mendes, and the dining room looks into an open kitchen. We had ringside seats from our table and watched the cooks work like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Everything was fantastic, but the best appetizer, hands down, was the beef tongue. I know. Trust me. (The dining room was designed by the Danish studio Space Copenhagen. Our interior designer had flown home the day before, which is a shame; she’d have had plenty to look at between courses.)

Cooks working at the open kitchen counter of Cozinha das Flores
Ringside seats at Cozinha das Flores. The best appetizer of the trip was the beef tongue, and I won’t hear otherwise.
Elaborate dessert at Tascö restaurant.
Goat cheese “cheese cake” dessert at Tascö. The dish in the background is a Lemon Curd dessert.

4. Tascö, Porto. This was one of Rafael Ribeiro’s recommendations. Four of us showed up without a reservation, and the restaurant was reluctant to seat us because a large party was coming later to pack the place. They agreed on one condition: we had to leave by 10 p.m. We had planned to anyway.

Then we met our server, Catarina. As the evening went on, we reminded her that we had promised to leave by 10. “I will fix that,” she said, and disappeared. When she came back to the table, she had negotiated on our behalf, and our deadline had moved to 10:30. The food was excellent, creative and beautiful and it was all accomplished with fantastic service. Catarina toasted with us more than once. Even 10:30 proved flexible: we finally walked out at 11, just as the huge party was arriving. On the way out, she hugged each of us and told me, in particular, “I love you.” I’m probably the age of her grandfather. It was completely genuine, and it was typical of the family feeling we found all over Portugal. It’s not surprising that it’s the 8th highest rated restaurant in Porto among 2,886 restaurants on TripAdvisor.

5. The Yeatman, Gaia. This was the big splurge: a two-Michelin-star restaurant in a luxury wine hotel on the Gaia hillside, with a terrace view of all of Porto across the river. It was our last night in Portugal. The dinner for four of us cost about as much as a round-trip transcontinental plane ticket. The food was beautiful, the service was a tantalizing, orchestrated dance, the pairings of wine (and non-alcoholic drinks) with each course were stupendous, and the view was unbeatable. But my honest verdict: I’d choose Nova Casa de Ramiro in Óbidos. I’m a sucker for warmth, and that’s not to say the Yeatman staff weren’t friendly. To a person, they were. Nova Casa (and Tascö) felt like family.

I am not an oyster fan, but the oyster The Yeatman served, complete with an edible “shell,” was delicious. They also brought a dish made from prawns, caviar, prawn NOODLES (yep, noodles made from prawns) and a mousse. One of our group has a shellfish allergy and Yeatman made accommodations. In fact, I nibbled on one of the alternative appetizers and it was delicious.

One of the great things The Yeatman did was the farturas I promised you back in Nazaré. Theirs were by far the best of the trip, as might be expected at the price point.

Steven and Tricia on the terrace of The Yeatman with Porto behind them
The two of us on the Yeatman terrace, dressed up for the most expensive dinner of the trip. Porto agreed to be the backdrop for free.
An elaborate plated dessert next to a glass of red wine at The Yeatman
One of many beautiful courses at The Yeatman. Each one was a work of art.
Porto and the Dom Luís I bridge lit up at night across the Douro
Porto at night from The Yeatman. This view is included in the price.
The entrance to Bairro do Avillez in Lisboa, with its sign over the door
The door to Bairro do Avillez in the Chiado. We went through it twice.

6. Bairro do Avillez, Lisboa. Funny thing: we walked past Belcanto, chef José Avillez’s two-Michelin-star restaurant in Lisboa, and begged for a lunch or dinner seat for 6. Alas, they were full that night and closed for the next two days (Sunday and Monday). The greeter suggested Bairro do Avillez instead, a “four-concept restaurant” by the same chef. It, too, was delicious. Since we weren’t super hungry, what I remember most fondly is the caldo verde, a classic Portuguese soup of potato and finely shredded greens. An even odder thing happened as we turned away from Belcanto’s door: out walked a woman who had studied with our son for his sommelier certification. They had not seen each other in five years. She was in town because her husband was competing for top honors in an international sommelier competition. We went back to Bairro a second time; it’s a good place for a drink, a snack, or a meal. By the way the “Encanto” – a vegetarian restaurant sits right next to the Belcanto and carries a Michelin star.

7. Ja!mon Ja!mon, Óbidos. Like Nova Casa, this was recommended by the Pousada staff, and it was great. It’s mostly outdoors in a lovely courtyard, and the dining is casual. It also started a family disagreement about the spelling, which raged for most of the next day. I was the only one of the six who correctly remembered the exclamation points in the name and the two-color lettering on the sign. I mention this purely for the historical record. Jamón means “ham” in Spanish, and “Ja! Mon” struck me as a friendly Jamaican phrase. Whatever deeper meaning the name means, I do not rightly know. I am making stuff up!

The Famous Ones That Missed

Not everything famous was a hit. Porto’s signature dish is the francesinha (“little Frenchie”), a multi-layered sandwich of ham, sausage, and steak, smothered in melted cheese and a beer-and-tomato sauce, often crowned with a fried egg and surrounded by fries. Before we’d even tried one, I bought a pair of francesinha socks as a souvenir. That was a mistake in sequencing.

Our tour driver and a server in the Wine and Book hotel café gave us two different recommendations for where to get one. We went with the driver’s pick, and most of us were disappointed. Afterward the server explained what we’d done wrong: the driver had sent us to the popular place, while hers had the better sauce, and the sauce is what makes a francesinha. Lesson learned: when a local tells you about the sauce, listen to the local who talks about the sauce.

The other Lisboa and Porto classic is the bifana, a simple sandwich of thin pork cutlets marinated in garlic and wine with a little hit of hot pepper. Partway through our long walk, our son stood in a very long line at a famous bifana counter while the rest of us rested our knees. It was a bit of a miss for most of us too – owing to the soggy bread. I liked it better than the francesinha, which is faint praise, but at least the socks didn’t commemorate it.

Cocktails, Hidden and Otherwise

Curioso bar. Photo by Tela Wright

Our son also found Curioso, a cocktail bar in the Ribeira district about a block from Cozinha das Flores. The cocktails were genuinely inventive, and our sommelier approved, which is high praise. Then it got better: downstairs, in the same building, is Apotecário, a speakeasy you enter through what looks like a wall of drawers in an old apothecary. Apotecário is known for bartenders who ask about your tastes and your mood and then build a drink to match: a prescription, if you like. We felt very clever for about four seconds, until we remembered that our son was the one who’d found it. For what its worth, what the “tour director” made me was all good.

The Port, the Pastry, and the Beans

Three more things deserve a place in the culinary hall of fame. The pastéis de nata, especially the originals at Belém. The peixinhos da horta at Entretanto, tempura’s Portuguese ancestor. And the 20-year-old Tawny port, which turned a skeptic into a believer.

Accommodations and Planning

Our three bases each had their own personality:

  • Hotel do Chiado, Lisboa: centrally located in the Chiado, with the Entretanto rooftop bar. Come for the location, stay for the sunsets and the green beans. The lobby is not much, the elevators are tiny (makes sense given the age of the hotel), but the location was fantastic and everything was clean and in good working order.
  • Pousada do Castelo, Óbidos: you sleep inside a medieval castle (I believe there are 3 such rooms available). The arrow-slit window is part of the experience. The staff’s restaurant tips were worth the price of the room. If you do not get a tower room, the more modern portion had very generous sized rooms as my daughter discovered. The downside is more steps up to the breakfast area and restaurant (from the towers it is a flat walk with a “guest only” door to access the upper floor). There are even more rooms tucked against the walls along the bottom floor.
  • Wine & Books, Porto: a comfortable, characterful hotel within walking distance (or Uber distance) of everything, with a rooftop bar of its own and its own spectacular sunsets. It did have one very peculiar design choice: the shower sits open on three sides in the middle of the room. Even the suites on the 5th floor have a shower that open onto the outdoor balcony!
A dramatic red and orange sunset with construction cranes
Sunset from the rooftop bar at Wine & Books in Porto. The construction cranes are part of the scenery these days. See “housing protest,” above.

A few hard-won tips:

  • Book Pena Palace and Livraria Lello ahead. Our 10:00 Lello entry let us bypass the hundreds already in line. Our Pena tickets had an 11:00 entry time, and it still took 45 minutes of snaking through a line to get inside. “This is not the worst it gets” is not a joke.
  • Wear real shoes. Cobblestones and the smaller stones that pave the sidewalks are beautiful, slippery, and unforgiving. The Portuguese massage is free, but the physical therapy afterward is not.
  • Use Uber in Porto. It’s cheap, and it saves your knees on the hills.
  • Make dinner reservations, and when the hotel staff (or a winemaker) recommend a place, go. They were right every time.
  • For famous dishes, ask the locals where the best version is, not the most popular one. Ask about the sauce.
  • Bring someone who knows wine. We recommend a sommelier. Ours is not available for hire. Correction: our sommelier has reviewed this article and informs us that he is very much available for hire.

Portuguese for Spanish Speakers: A Survival Guide

On paper, Portuguese and Spanish are close cousins. A Spanish speaker can read a Portuguese menu with reasonable success. Listening is a different story. Here’s what I learned, mostly the hard way.

Rule One: Obrigado, Not Gracias

Every guide told us repeatedly that the biggest mistake you can make in Portugal is to say gracias. They were mostly kidding. The Portuguese and the Spanish enjoy a long and healthy tradition of ribbing each other, and we heard this suggestion so often that I came to see it as a national pastime. Men say obrigado and women say obrigada. It literally means “obliged,” like the Spanish obligado, which brings us to the sounds.

  • L’s often become R’s. Obligado becomes obrigado, blanco (white) becomes branco, playa (beach) becomes praia, iglesia (church) becomes igreja, and plaza becomes praça. Silver, plata, becomes prata, which matters quite a bit when you are jewelry shopping.
  • Sometimes the L just leaves. The Spanish salida (exit) is the Portuguese saída. You’ll see it on every door and every highway sign.
  • B’s sometimes become V’s. Librería (bookstore) becomes livraria, which is how Livraria Lello got its name.
  • Z goes into hiding. Where Spanish has a z, Portuguese often has a ç, a c with a cedilla: plaza becomes praça, and cabeza becomes cabeça.
  • NH is ñ, and LH is ll. Espanha in Portuguese is España in Spanish, and vinho (wine, which you will need) is “VEEN-yo.” LH makes an “el-yeh” sound: mulher (woman) is “mool-YEHR.”
  • X shows up a lot, usually sounding like “sh”: peixe (fish) is “PAY-shuh,” and Lisboa’s downtown, the Baixa, is “BYE-sha.” (I noticed the same thing around Barcelona, where Catalan – and Elon Musk – are just as fond of the letter.)
  • S usually sounds like “sh.” At the end of a syllable, s turns into sh: pastéis sounds like “pash-TAYSH,” and Lisboa sounds like “Lizh-BOH-ah.”
  • Endings get swallowed. Unstressed vowels shrink or vanish, especially at the ends of words. Porto sounds more like “Portu,” and our bellhop introduced himself as “DYOH-goo” (his badge read Diogo, the Portuguese cousin of Diego). A whole sentence can sound like a single long word. Imagine a Spanish speaker who is slightly sleepy and very relaxed.

Hello, Please, Yes

  • Bom dia (good morning), boa tarde (good afternoon), and boa noite (good evening, and good night). In practice, boa tarde comes out closer to “BOH TARD”; the final a in the first word and the ending e barely show up. If you haven’t yet eaten lunch, it’s too early to say boa tarde.
  • Bom in Spanish is buen, and here’s the twist. Spanish greets you in the plural, buenos días, while the singular buen día is, in much of the Spanish-speaking world, more of a send-off: “have a good day.” Portugal says hello with the singular, bom dia.
  • Why bom dia but boa tarde? Gender. Dia ends in a but is masculine in both languages (it’s el día in Spanish, too), while tarde and noite are feminine. So the “good” changes clothes to match the gender of the following word.
  • Sim means yes. Por favor still means please. Use both often.

Gender Trouble at the Table

My most consistent mistakes came at mealtimes. I asked for una cuchara and got a polite, puzzled look; a spoon is a colher. A knife isn’t un cuchillo but a faca, so a masculine Spanish knife turns into a feminine Portuguese one. And a fork is not el tenedor but o garfo, which sounds less like cutlery than something you’d say after stubbing a toe.

Some words did come easily: a igreja (la iglesia, the church), and a escada (la escalera, the stairs), which in Porto you will need constantly. Bread is o pão, not el pan. (Watch out for bolo, which usually means cake, though in Madeira and the Azores a bolo can be a kind of bread.

False Friends

  • Azeite looks and sounds like the Spanish aceite (oil), but in Portuguese it means specifically olive oil. Ordinary oil is óleo. Both words come from the Arabic az-zayt, so this is a family argument that’s been going on for a thousand years.
  • Esquisito means “weird,” not “exquisite,” so think twice before you compliment the chef.
  • Embaraçada means embarrassed. In Spanish, embarazada means pregnant. Mixing them up is embarrassing in either language. This one amuses me because my high school Spanish teacher, who once worked as a flight steward, liked to tell about a passenger who spilled her drink and announced, mortified, that she was embarazada. The man sitting next to her turned red. Perhaps she was Portuguese!

Gracias, Finally

On our last morning, our driver to the Porto airport spoke in halting English. After a few exchanges I asked where he was from.

“Cuba,” he said.

After two weeks of being told never, ever to say gracias, I finally had my chance. For the rest of the ride I let loose with all the Spanish I’d been holding in for two weeks. When we pulled up to the terminal, I thanked him with the word I’d been told never to use in Portugal.

“Gracias.”

It was the best word I said all trip.

The castle of Óbidos with round crenellated towers and stone walls under a deep blue sky
The castle of Óbidos, our crowning memory of Portugal. Romans and Visigoths held this hilltop first; the Moors fortified it in the 8th century; Portugal’s first king, Afonso Henriques, took it in 1148; and King Dinis and Queen Isabel expanded it around 1300, after he gave her the town as a wedding gift. Since the mid-20th century it has been a pousada. For two nights, it was home. That large window in the center is located in the restaurant of the Pousada.

Have you been to Portugal? Or are you a Spanish speaker who has been vorpalized by Portuguese? Tell me in the comments. And for our last adventure, a river cruise on the Danube that somehow redeemed an earlier North Sea disaster, the Danube Waltz story is here.

About the images: All photos taken with a Samsung S24 Ultra unless otherwise noted. Some photos courtesy of our fellow travelers. GPS tracks were recorded during the trip.







					

		
		
	

							
	

				

			
						

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Published June 3, 2026





After our harrowing January 2025 adventure aboard the Viking Vela which involved 100 mph winds, 37 foot seas, my wife being hurled across the cabin, a black eye from a flying menu tray, and a ship that spent five unplanned days in Ålesund while the crew swept up the wreckage; most people would have written off Viking entirely. We did not. We are either very forgiving, very optimistic, or very slow learners. Possibly all three.





So in March 2026, armed with our 100% fare voucher (see the original article for my thoughts on that math), we booked the Viking Danube Waltz: Passau to Budapest, with a pre-cruise stay in Prague and a post-cruise swing through Zagreb and Ljubljana. The verdict? We’d do it again in a heartbeat. The Danube delivered everything the Norwegian coast took away from us.







About the images: I reserve all rights to use of these images for any commercial purpose. You may use them as backgrounds or wallpaper for your personal use, but any other use requires a license. Images were taken with a Samsung S24 Ultra phone unless otherwise noted.












Prague: The Warm-Up Act That Steals the Show





We arrived four days early. The same logic as before: jet lag is brutal, and planes are sometimes unreliable. My pre-failure here was in not securing business class seats – but we managed. This time we stayed in Prague rather than London, which turned out to be the right call. Prague is spectacular, and unlike London it doesn’t charge you £400 for the privilege of being rained on.












The Old Town Square alone is worth the airfare. The medieval Astronomical Clock – the Orloj – performs a brief mechanical procession of apostles every hour. The audience of tourists pointing phones at it would confuse the 15th-century clockmaker, but I think he’d be pleased the thing still runs.





We walked the Charles Bridge in the day, and again at night. It’s lined with 30 Baroque statues of saints, each one dramatic enough to star in its own cathedral. The bridge is pedestrian-only, and the imposing Prague Castle lit up on the hill, reflected in the Vltava below – is exactly as good as every photo you’ve ever seen of it. Possibly better.

At left: Old Town Square at night. The Astronomical Clock tower (left) and the Church of Our Lady before Týn (right). The clock has been running since 1410 – before Columbus sailed, before the printing press, before anyone thought to call it “Central Europe.”





Long exposure of the Charles Bridge from downstream using the telephoto (5x zoom). The reflections give you two photos for the price of one.






Kafka’s Head” – stainless steel sculpture by David Černý 






“Kafka’s Head” is a 45-layer rotating stainless steel sculpture by David Černý near the Palladium shopping center. The layers spin independently and periodically align into a recognizable face. Franz Kafka was born a few blocks away, which seems appropriate for a man who spent his career writing about fragmented, bewildering identities. What do I mean? Well Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) follows traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes up transformed into a giant cockroach. Yeah, that Kafka.





Street view from the Art Noveau Palace Hotel, Prague 





Breakfast in the dining area of the Art Nouveau Palace Hotel, Prague, looking down a typical street through an arched window. Prague is full of interiors like this: elegant, unhurried, and considerably cheaper than the equivalent in Vienna or Paris.  And it was just blocks away that we found Svíčková. But you’ll have to wait for that.






Prague’s terracotta roofline from the grounds of the Prague Castle complex.






The city looks much as it has for centuries, which is either extraordinary preservation or a shortage of developers with ambition. You can see that ambition is not lost on the newer parts of Prague – check out those MANY cranes in the distance!





A practical note: Prague is extremely walkable if you are willing to do a lot of walking. The food is excellent and cheap by Western European standards, and the transit system is clean and reliable – or so we observed. We arrived late on the first day, and the three days remaining felt short. If you can swing four, do it. Word of caution: beware any ATM machine that say “EuroNet”. They are well documented tourist traps with hideous exchange rates. And by the way, that is the least best thing about Prague. The Czech Republic (and Hungary) use their own currency. In the republic currency is called the koruna, or crown (code: CZK) not the Euro. In fact, Hungary (with its forint’s) was the only place where we had to switch phone plans to stay connected. The good news is that credit cards are accepted just about everywhere.









Prague Walking Track — March 2026







Prague Airport and Walking Track – March 2026

GPS track recorded during pre-cruise exploration

















Passau: A Lovely City With a Dark Footnote





From Prague we traveled by coach to Passau, Germany – our ship departure point. Passau is a small, photogenic city at the confluence of three rivers (the Danube, the Inn, and the Ilz), which gives it a layered, peninsular quality. It also floods constantly, which the locals have documented on their buildings with remarkable precision.












Our Passau guide, Esther, was originally from Singapore, married a German, and earned her citizenship – giving her an outsider-insider perspective on the city that was worth any organized tour. She walked us through the city pointing out trams and buses, oddly named streets and flood marks. She explained German bureaucracy with the rueful humor of a survivor, and then told us about a four-year-old boy who once fell through the thin ice on the Inn River and was pulled out by a local priest who later became the St. Stephen’s cathedral organist.





“That boy,” she said, pausing for effect, “was Adolf Hitler.”

<- Our guide, Esther, pointing out the high-water marks embedded in the wall. Each plaque records a different flood year. The marks go considerably above head height. The uppermost plaque, recording the highest flood reads: After the birth of Christ, in the year 1501, on Our Lady’s Day, the floodwaters rose to the cross. Passau has been doing this for a very long time. The street name: Roßtränke means “Horse Trough”






St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Passau. Home to the largest pipe organ north of the Alps (17,974 pipes). We did not hear it play.













Passau also had opinions about geopolitics. Several shop windows in the Old Town displayed signs reading “Putin’s Supporters: No Entry.” Central Europe’s proximity to Ukraine makes the war feel considerably less abstract there than it might from, say, Seattle.

It’s worth noting, too, that many of the towns and countries we visited along the Danube have taken in enormous numbers of Ukrainian refugees. We spoke with Ukrainians everywhere – some tending shops, some cleaning them, some in heavy industry, many aboard ship. The most Ukrainians taken in per capita were in Estonia, Czechia (aka the Czech Republic), Slovakia – and Ireland.  Bravo to those countries for their hospitality. Poland received more but they are much larger country  – and, of course – a neighbor to the Ukraine.

It was palpable to us, as American’s abroad, in that the war with Iran was started on February 28th, was still ongoing during our sojourn abroad – and is still ongoing today in June as I write this.










Aboard the Viking Vilhjalm: The Flat-Water Difference





The Viking Vilhjalm is a river longship measuring 443 feet long, 38 feet wide, and hauling 190 passengers. The Viking Vela carried 998. The most immediate practical difference: nothing rocks or rolls. The river is glassy, the ship is flat, and at no point did anyone measure the tilt with a bubble level app. This was, I cannot overstate, a significant improvement.





The Vilhjalm from the Chain bridge over the Danube. The dining room glows through the panoramic windows – a reminder that one of the pleasures of river cruising is dining while watching the city drift past.










The Viking Vilhjalm docked in Budapest as the blue hour settles in. The Buda skyline – Fisherman’s Bastion, Matthias Church – lit up behind it. This is what “docked in the heart of the city” looks like.






River cruises also pass under bridges and through locks with impressive frequency and minimal clearance. The wheelhouse folds flat hydraulically, which you can watch from the sun deck (if allowed, that is, some under-crossings are less spacious than others). The captain threads the ship under railway bridges at night without drama. On our previous cruise, “drama” was essentially the entire experience. The contrast was noted and appreciated.





Night passage. The wheelhouse is partially retracted to clear the bridge. The margin looks alarming; apparently it is not.






The smaller passenger count means the crew learns names, preferences, and jokes. Which brings us to the Hannah Waddington situation.










Rebecca from Ted Lasso, Apparently on a Career Break





One of the dining crew was the spitting image of Hannah Waddington – the 6-foot-tall British actress who plays club owner Rebecca Welton in Ted Lasso. tricia, who cannot let a good resemblance go unnoted, asked her if anyone had ever said she looks like the star.





She paused. “That’s the first time this year!”





Then: “…and this is the first cruise of the year.”






Steven (me) and “Hannah” (Anett)






The delivery was impeccable. She had a wickedly good sense of humor and warm presence to match, and by the second day we – along with a growing number of other passengers – were specifically seeking out her section. If you sail on the Vilhjalm and a tall, very funny woman who looks uncannily like Hannah Waddington is working the dining room: request her table. Don’t call her Hannah, though, her name is Anett, and she’s from Latvia. You’re welcome.




















Linz and Pöstlingberg: A Frankfurter Worth the Climb





Linz is Austria’s third-largest city and the one most likely to surprise you. It sits at the foot of a vine-covered hill called Pöstlingberg – which roughly translated means “the postal area mountain”. You can reach its heights by a historic tram that begins downtown and claims to be one of the steepest adhesion railways in the world. At the top of the Pöstlingbergbahn you will find a Grottenbahn – which is a whimsical “grotto railway” for children. It wasn’t running, we missed that train.  The tram left from this very square.











Linz’s Hauptplatz (main square) with the famous “LINZ” letter sculpture framing the Plague Column. Yes, “Plague Column”. That’s a bit of history North Americans did not have to endure, and many cities have monuments erected commemorating the end of the Black Death. Linz has worked hard to rebrand itself as a cultural city – it is the birthplace of Anton Bruckner a bizarre man and brilliant composer, and home to the Ars Electronica festival. Also, regrettably, the hometown of Hitler. A city dealing with a complicated legacy.





At the top of Pöstlingberg, the Schloss Bräu restaurant has a deck with a panoramic view of Linz spread far below in the Danube valley. We had the Frankfurters. Two of them each, served in a delicious crunchy pretzel-like bun with shredded fresh horseradish. It sounds humble. It was not humble. It was the second-best thing I ate on the entire trip, and I ate some genuinely excellent things on this trip.





Pöstlingberg, looking back down over the rooftops to Linz in the valley and the Danube beyond. The Schloss Bräu restaurant is to the right of this picture, but has a view much like that large terrace you see at the right. The Frankfurters are not visible but trust me





Leaving Linz at sunset. The ship’s glass-topped lounge reflects the sky; the church spire marks the town behind us. River cruising provides a great many sunsets like this.
















Göttweig Abbey: Apricot Dumplings and Baroque Excess





Between Linz and Krems is Göttweig Abbey (Stift Göttweig) which is a Benedictine monastery perched on a hill above the Wachau Valley that has been operating since 1083. The docking is in Krems – so you’ve already had chance to catch a glimpse of Göttweig high up on a hill before a bus takes you there. The current Baroque buildings date to the 18th century and are, in the way of 18th-century ecclesiastical architecture, considerably larger than necessary.





Stift Göttweig. The foundation stone was laid in 1083; the current complex was rebuilt in Baroque style after a fire in 1718. The abbey produces its own wine, olive oil, and apricot products from the surrounding orchards.






The Wachau Valley is Austria’s most celebrated wine and apricot-growing region, and Göttweig’s café served apricot dumplings (Marillenknödel) – soft potato dough wrapped around a whole apricot with its pit removed and replaced by a sugar cube, rolled in buttered breadcrumbs. You have not had apricot dumplings until you have had apricot dumplings at a Benedictine monastery overlooking a UNESCO World Heritage valley. I’m setting the bar deliberately high.










The Wachau Valley: Castles Included, No Extra Charge





The stretch of Danube between Linz and Krems is the Wachau. And it is a UNESCO World Heritage landscape of vineyards, medieval villages, and castle ruins perched on cliffs. It is the kind of scenery that makes the cruise fare feel justified regardless of everything else.





Schönbühel Castle, which has watched the Danube since the 12th century. The current structure dates to 1821. It still looks appropriately medieval from the water.





The town of Dürnstein is where Richard the Lionheart was imprisoned in 1192. His loyal minstrel Blondel supposedly wandered Europe singing outside castle walls until Richard sang back – one of history’s more musical jailbreaks. The ruins are still on the cliff above town, and the blue Baroque church tower below makes the village look like a painting someone left out in good weather.





Dürnstein. The blue church tower belongs to the Augustinian monastery. Richard the Lionheart’s castle ruins are on the cliff above. He did not leave a review.











Sailing through the Wachau on a clear March morning. The Austrian flag indicates we’ve crossed from Germany. The valley looks exactly like a UNESCO site should.










Vienna: More Than a Day Could Justify





Vienna got one full day, which was not enough. It is enormous, beautiful, and packed with imperial grandeur at a density that becomes mildly numbing – the opera house, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the parliament, the Burgtheater, Stephansdom, all within walking distance, all built to impress, all succeeding.





The Kunsthistorisches Museum on Maria-Theresien-Platz, facing its twin the Natural History Museum across the square. Both were built in the 1890s and both contain more than you can see in an afternoon.





Stephansdom (St. Stephen’s Cathedral) in the heart of Vienna. The spire is 448 feet tall. 





The outdoor café in the foreground seems unbothered by the huge spire and features something worth stopping for: Kaiserschmarrn – which is literally translated “Emperor’s Mess” – it’s a delicious pancake thingy. If there is no table space, you can find a take out window with a quick moving line.

It seems every city we stopped in had it’s own composer of record. I couldn’t keep them straight. When I blurted out “Richard Strauss” trying to answer our Vienna tour guide query: the guide’s stern eye and swift correction “Johann Strauss” made me realize I made an embarrassing faux pas. Johann is from Vienna, Richard is from Berlin.  It felt for a moment like I had put ketchup on a hot dog in Chicago.





Come back for three days minimum. Consider bringing a museum membership.










Bratislava: The Underrated One





Bratislava in Slovakia gets less attention than Prague, Vienna, and Budapest, which is undeserved. The old town is compact, walkable, and genuinely lovely. The Primate’s Palace, where Napoleon and Austrian Emperor Francis II signed the Peace of Pressburg in 1805, is among the finest Neoclassical buildings in Central Europe, and the compact scale of the city means you’re never far from something worth seeing.





The Primate’s Palace, Bratislava. Napoleon signed a treaty here. It now houses the mayor’s office, which seems like a reasonable use of a landmark.






Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising, also known as the UFO Bridge, located in Bratislava, Slovakia






Speaking of landmarks, the most unusual bridge we passed beneath was the “UFO Bridge” in Bratislava, Slovakia.  It is odd in that it is a cable-stayed bridge that has a single pylon with a “saucer shaped restaurant” at the top. We had the time to give it a try, but decided to remain on our side of the Danube and enjoy the view instead. 
The bridge was built in late 1960s and early ’70s at the height of Communist excess, in honor of the 1944 resistance movement against the Nazi forces.  It’s probably the ONLY communist era structure with pizazz. Throughout the Slavic countries, astute guides will point out how to easily distinguish Soviet era buildings from any others: the Soviet Era buildings are the ugly ones, i.e. gray, square, and unembellished.





What NOT To Do if You Are A Linguist





Now might be a good time to point out what not to do when in any former Slavic country. Language is my thing. I am weird that way.  I’m fairly fluent in German so Passau (Germany) to Vienna (Austria) was easy. But Czech’s of course speak Czech, while Slovakians, Slovenians, and Croats all speak their own dialects – but each mostly understands the other.  The mistake NOT to make is noting aloud how each “Good Morning”  greeting sounds like Russian which is pronounced “DOBRaye OOTra”.  I made that mistake several times (I’m a slow learner) as I tried to pronounce local “Good Day” and “Thank You” variations. All those countries were once under the thumb of the Soviet Union, of which they do not like to be reminded.  Everyone I spoke to – including the Hungarians – agreed that Hungarian is the most impossible language ever.  This is especially amusing to me now, because one of my photos appeared in the Hungarian edition of “The Economist” and that partially explains the bizarre way they spelled my name in the credits. A Hungarian article about when I won the Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest came with a similar, unrecognizable, transmogrification of my name.

While I’m on the subject, here are a few notes for us Westerners.  What German speakers call Donau (Duh-NOW) we call the Danube. What westerners call “Prague” the Czechs – who live there – call Praha, Wien (pronounced VEEN), is the actual name of Vienna.  If it seems almost everything Czech (Č) ends with a “ch” or an “itch” … well, that’s because almost everything does.  To their credit, they bother to show how to accent things. English is a quagmire.










Budapest: The Grand Finale





Budapest may be the most photogenic city in Europe. I say this having just come from Prague, Vienna, and Bratislava, all of which are lovely. Budapest operates at a different scale of dramatic. The Danube cuts the city in two – Buda on the west with its castle and Baroque churches on the hill, Pest on the east with the Parliament and the grand avenues – and both sides light up at night in a way that makes the river between them glow.





The Hungarian Parliament building from the Buda side by day. 879 feet long, 96 domes, 691 rooms, built between 1885 and 1904. Still the largest building in Hungary.





The Parliament lit gold at night. The daytime photograph is impressive; the night photograph is something else.










One of the four lions guarding the Chain Bridge, with Buda Castle lit above. The lions were installed in 1852 and have been criticized ever since for lacking tongues. They remain silent on the matter.






60 pairs of iron shoes, installed in 2005 to commemorate the Jews shot here. 






Budapest also contains one of the most affecting memorials I have seen anywhere. That’s saying a lot. My wife and I both stood along the long black marble Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, DC and we wept as we watched a legless wheelchair-bound vet rub his hand slowly and somberly over the name of a fallen colleague.

Along the Pest bank of the Danube, 60 pairs of iron shoes mark the spot where Hungarian Jews were shot by the Arrow Cross militia and fell into the river during the winter of 1944–45. The shoes represent different people: men’s shoes, women’s shoes, a child’s. There is no plaque required to understand what you’re looking at.

In fact, I didn’t notice when I took the photo, but someone has placed Ukrainian flag ribbons on a pair of women’s shoes – a quiet statement about history’s tendency to repeat.











Breakfast aboard the Vilhjalm, docked in Budapest. Matthias Church and Fisherman’s Bastion through the window. The coffee was also good – per my wife. I mostly drank peppermint tea.





One of the pleasures of river cruising is waking up docked in the heart of a city. Breakfast with Matthias Church visible through the dining room window is a specific luxury that anchors-and-tender ocean cruising can seldom match.










The Food: An Itinerary Within the Itinerary






Svíčková na smetaně: braised beef in creamy root vegetable sauce, with cranberries, lemon zest, cream, and bread dumplings on the side. The Czech dark beer appears to have been involved as well. 






A Danube cruise feeds you well on both sides of the gangway. The single best dish of the trip was Svíčková na smetaně – a classic Czech preparation of braised beef sirloin in a rich, creamy root vegetable sauce, served with bread dumplings (knedlíky), cranberry sauce, and lemon zest. We learned about it from our driver from the Prague airport, who had grown up in Czechoslovakia during the communist era and steered us toward it with the conviction of someone passing on essential knowledge. He was right. If you are in Prague and you skip the Svíčková (SVEETCH KO VAH) in favor of something you already know, you will regret it. The same driver said something that really stuck with me: 

“The Czechs and the Slovaks split the country, and only the politicians remember why.” The Velvet Divorce as it is called happened in 1992. Each country is less populous than the city of Los Angeles.





The second-best dish – which was mentioned earlier and surprised me – was a humble Frankfurter at Schloss Bräu in Pöstlingberg, above Linz: served in a crunchy pretzel bun with shredded fresh horseradish. Simple ingredients, flawless execution, and a view of the Danube valley as a bonus.





Göttweig Abbey’s apricot dumplings have already been covered in the relevant section but deserve a second mention here because they were awesome – not to mention the fact that the ship’s chef prepared a cooking demonstration about how to make them.  The chef had very strong opinions about why the way he and the Viennese made schnitzel was superior. “It seems foolish to me to get a delicious crispy finished dish and then place it in or cover it with a sauce that makes it soggy.” He was very right!

Some of the local flare was less impressive, of course. One of the worst mistakes we made, food wise, was attempting to get Vietnamese food in Prague (What WERE we thinking!?) In our defense, Slavic food is much like German food. Heavy on the sauces and shades of brown, butter and meat – so the Vietnamese fiasco was an attempt to get healthier, lighter fare. It was reminiscent of traveling in Spain where it seemed nothing green was going to ever appear on a plate and we pleaded with the hotel for a plate of broccoli. In Slovenia, green appeared on the plate, but parsley just doesn’t count as a vegetable, does it?






Slovenian sausage with sauerkraut and sides in Ljubljana, complete with a Slovenian flag toothpick. Local restaurants in Ljubljana take the flag – and the sausage very seriously. We were less of a fan.











Breakfast aboard the Vilhjalm. The kitchen arranged the Eggs Benedict, sausages, and bacon into a smiley face (Of course it was Anett’s doing). The food was consistently excellent, but this particular presentation was memorable. 





The Viking ship’s own kitchen was consistently good. Genuinely good. Not “good for a boat.” The Eggs Benedict arranged into a smiley face one morning was a small detail that suggested the kitchen was paying attention and having fun.  But everything was consistently good to excellent.










Zagreb and Ljubljana: The Bonus Round





The post-cruise days took us first to Zagreb for two days, and then to Ljubljana for two more. Both of which exceeded expectations.





Zagreb has the confident ease of a city that knows its own value without needing to advertise it. The Croatian National Theatre – canary yellow, impeccably maintained since Emperor Franz Joseph inaugurated it in 1895 – anchors the lower city. The upper town is medieval, quiet, and connected by a funicular that is so short it feels more like an elevator with ambitions. 





The Croatian National Theatre, Zagreb. Emperor Franz Joseph I inaugurated it in 1895. The flowers in the foreground are a reminder that spring arrives in the Balkans before it arrives in, say, Seattle.






Zagreb has a lot to point you toward. The bicycle appears to be making its own decisions.






Much of Zagreb was still enrobed in exterior scaffolding due to the 2020 6.4 magnitude earthquake (there were actually TWO that year). With a population less than 6 million people, and lots of very old buildings, I can see where having a small tax base makes all the fixes a protracted endeavor. One of the remarkable things about all the guides is how well versed in history they were. They were talking about dates in 1081, and 1400s. Being an American we have only a fraction of that history to remember.

While we were in Zagreb, there was very high security at the Esplanade Zagreb Hotel where we stayed. Apparently there was an international financial conference being held there. The police stopped the cars and tram on the street and we watched from the front steps of the hotel as an entourage of vehicles displaying Ukrainian flags rolled up. We tried to be inconspicuous, thinking that we might catch a glimpse of Volodymyr Zelenskyy – the leader of the besieged Ukraine, but, alas, it was not him.




















Ljubljana, Slovenia is smaller, warmer, and aggressively charming. The Dragon Bridge and its four bronze guardian dragons, the old town’s distinctive Art Nouveau facades, the castle on the hill above – Ljubljana operates at a human scale that lets you actually be somewhere rather than trying to keep up with it.





Ljubljana’s old town. The decorated façade at left belongs to the Cooperative Bank building, designed by Maks Fabiani with distinctive folk-Art Nouveau ornamentation. 





Ljubljana punches above its weight architecturally. And yet it’s compact and EXTREMELY walkable – especially from our hotel the Grand Hotel Union Eurostars, Ljubljana. If you have been struggling with that city name (which I did for a LONG TIME) there is an easy way to get it right: just pretend the “J”s are “Y”s. Lyublyana (or Li-u-bli-an-a, if you’d rather).  It was my second favorite city. (Prague and Budapest tied for first).






One of the four copper dragons of Dragon Bridge. The city’s coat of arms features a dragon; the bridge takes the heraldry literally. They are said to bring good luck to true-born Ljubljanans.






Ljubljana Castle courtyard, Slovenian flag above the clock tower. The castle dates to the 12th century; the city has been climbing the hill to visit it ever since.










Lake Bled: Save the Best for Last





A day trip from Ljubljana to Lake Bled, was perhaps, the best day of the trip. Bled is one of those places that looks like a screensaver and turns out to be better in person, which feels like a minor miracle.





A glacial lake. A medieval castle on a cliff above the eastern shore. A Baroque church on a tiny natural island in the center of the lake, the only natural island in Slovenia, is reached by traditional flat-bottomed boats called pletnas. Julian Alps rising snow-capped in every direction. Even in late March, in mildly  overcast weather, it was remarkable.





The Church of the Assumption on Bled Island, photographed from Bled Castle above. There has been a place of worship on this island since the 8th century. The current church dates to the 17th. The 10x zoom on the phone came in handy here.











The two of us at Bled Castle. The *Sunday Today with Willie Geist* travel mug is holding up well. Photo by Harrison Bond.





One of the nice things about our Croatia and Slovenia extension is that because it was the beginning of the season there were just four of us. We fit comfortably into a van and were ferried around everywhere with one constant guide and driver. A lovely couple from Tennessee were good company throughout.





Near Bled: an Alpine house with the Julian Alps rising behind it. Slovenia is a serious mountain country and doesn’t get enough credit for it.










Viking vs. Viking: The Comparison





For anyone wondering whether a river cruise redeems the ocean cruise experience, here is the short version:





The river cruise wins on intimacy, stability, and access. 190 passengers on flat water, docked in city centers every night. You wake up in Budapest, not anchored somewhere offshore. The crew knows your name by day two. Nothing flies off the tables.





The ocean cruise wins on scale and spectacle when the weather cooperates – and the Norwegian fjords (when we finally reached them in Eidfjord) were every bit as spectacular as promised. When the weather doesn’t cooperate, it wins on spectacle of a different kind. See: the original article.





The Danube Waltz itinerary packs an exceptional density of civilization into eight days of sailing: the Wachau Valley, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest – all dockside, all walkable from the gangway. Add Prague, Zagreb, and Ljubljana as bookends and you have a genuinely hard-to-beat two-week itinerary through the heart of Central Europe.





Would we cruise Viking again? We already answered that question by booking this one. We’d do it again. Perhaps not in the North Sea. In January.





Photographer’s Post Trip Observation





We chose to travel with one suitcase each and one carry-on each. Instead of bringing my normal photo backpack laden with camera gear, I chose to try JUST using the phone.  I definitely missed some great night sky and landscape photo opportunities. I definitely wished I had brought a simple tripod.  The one huge mistake I made though: I forgot to turn on GPS location tagging for my photos until near the end of the trip. But the phone did afford me with good photos, communication, and I was able to use GPS (from the tracking app I used). That tracking turned out to be a life saver in remembering which of thousands of photos came from where. 

All in all it was not a terrible trade off – especially since the 5x and 10x lenses on the Samsung came in handy on several occasions. It would have been much harder to do without bringing multiple seriously large lenses.  I think next trip, however, I’m going to lug the big tripod and the “real” camera.










If you’ve cruised the Danube Waltz or visited any of these cities, drop a note in the comments. And if you want context on why anything short of a hurricane felt like a triumph on this trip, the original Viking Vela story is here.







About the images: All photos taken with a Samsung S24 Ultra unless otherwise noted. GPS tracks were recorded throughout the trip.























					

		
		
	

							
	

				

			
						

				Titanic Adventures in the North Sea
			

										

					9 Replies				

					


				

			

Released: January 22, 2025
Edited: April 3, 2026 (add links)







Viking Vela at Ålesund dock (from webcam)





Viking Vela In Bergen Harbor







To celebrate our December, 2024 retirement my wife and I booked an Aurora Borealis Cruise with Viking. We had previously cruised with Viking for a Rhine River cruise which I never documented, but briefly describe here for context. The river cruise occurred in November, 2021 from Basel, Switzerland to Amsterdam, Netherlands. It was originally scheduled to depart in May, 2020 but… COVID! We stuck it out until it was actually possible to go.







About the images: I reserve all rights to use of these images for any commercial purpose. You may use them as backgrounds or wallpaper for your personal use, but any other use requires a license.  The majority of these images were taken with a Samsung S24 Ultra phone.







So, the great retirement getaway was meant to combine two of our goals: Seeing the Aurora Borealis again (we were fortunate to see them in December, 2023 in Fairbanks, Alaska), and visiting the Fjords of Norway. I had suspicion that the cruise might be dicey as the North Sea and Norwegian coast are rather famous for big seas and fierce winds in winter. Well, there were big seas and fierce winds! The first day of cruising was a stop in Ijmuiden (Amsterdam) and the weather was fabulously sunny. We enjoyed a canal boat tour.





The “Dancing Houses” of Amsterdam. They all lean in different directions due to being built on wooden poles that are hundreds of years old.





Sailing out of Amsterdam toward our next destination of Narvik, Norway, we knew there would be almost 2 full days of sailing as Narvik is quite far north.





Leaving Amsterdam looking over the pool deck and retractable roof.





Foreboding clouds approaching.





But despite the captains warning that seas may be a bit rough and encouragement that our course would spare us much of the ruckus, there was a big squall starting and we were not able to outrun it. By about 10 PM, the ship was rolling about 5 degrees side to side as measured by my bubble level app.  Before the big rolling I measured the listing as 6.8 degrees starboard and to port (during the biggest heaves, I measured 9.5 degrees sway to each side!)






Tilt at 3:17. The worst was 9.5!








The Norwegian Sea wave forecast for 2 PM Norwegian Time (source) looked menacing. The crosshair is approximately where I expected we’d be at that time, but what you can’t see is that the storm was coming up in the direction we were sailing. Here you see wave heights forecast to as high as 10.5 meters (34 feet). 
At about 11 PM the rolling measured 6 degrees side to side on my bubble level. I wedged my boots into the closet door to stop it from slamming, and stowed all the breakables.  I know several folks had their sliding doors break the closet they were in.







If This Boat’s a Rockin’





By 1:00 CET, the ship was rolling up to 7 degrees side to side. I awoke at 1:30 CET due to the tossing and with my wife’s blessing went down to the first deck to watch the Washington Commanders vs the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the executive lounge (where the internet was better). While there, and about 10 minutes before the end of the game the BIG rolling began at about 3:45.












The captain estimated the winds at 100 mph gusts, and seas of up to 37 feet. His first efforts were to turn the ship to keep the wind from causing the rolling. However at some point, that seemed to make matters worse. The first big rolling jolt toppled marble-top tables, flung open cabinets and contents went spilling. Two ladies came down to guest services on the first deck where I was because their water carafes and glasses had shattered in their stateroom. Another guy down there (Matt) said he thought he should go check on his girlfriend… I should have done the same. While the football game was still going on I captured some movies and still shots, and when the game ended (with a bounced-in walk-off field goal!) I returned to our stateroom (6092 at the port side stern) via the 7th deck where the pool is located. The pool area had massive mayhem as you can see in the photos below. I took the stairs because the elevators were making ominous banging noises in the rolling sea.





Bodily Injuries







My wife attempted to keep items from flying off the desk in our stateroom but was instead launched from the bedside to the window. That wasn’t enough injury, so as she got up after being hurled, a tray with daily news and menus sailed off a table and struck her in the forehead above her left eye. It broke the tray and left her with a goose egg that went black and blue under her hair and over the next 6 days turned into a black eye.







By the time I got back to our room, I was measuring 9.5 degrees tilt from starboard to port (19 degrees total). I was able to flag a steward to bring an ice pack for my wife – and our cabin attendant kept us supplied with ice ever after. 

We met several passengers with black eyes, and others recounted broken ribs a broken finger, a broken toe, and a broken nose. So, yeah, it was rough for many of the 998 passengers and 465 crew. Many of the crew told us they had never been in such difficult seas. Many of the injuries were from being thrown out of bed into the nightstands – but that tended to occur for those on upper decks (6, 7 and 8). Another person recounted getting hit in the shin by the shower door as they were on the throne. One of the black eye situations was a woman who was thrust from the bathroom to the sliding glass doors. She had a concussion and lingering pain, and double black eyes. The days following the rough and tumble seas reminded me of the scene in Jaws where they compared scars with one another.

We can’t speak highly enough of the great care, professionalism and kindness shown by the crew. Our cabin steward, as I noted took excellent care of us.





The captain, Rune Loekling, made announcements frequently through the night reassuring everyone that the ship was built to take the conditions. He asked everyone to stay in their staterooms for safety and that persisted through breakfast and lunch (the crew brought fruits and boiled eggs to the room for a late breakfast, and a cooked meal with salmon and beef for a late lunch. We diverted to Ålesund, Norway, arriving in port at about 21:00, though once in the protected fjord the weather no longer rocked and rolled the ship so furiously and folks were able to leave their staterooms to get dinner at about 18:30. It was a total of about 19 hours of “motion”. My main concern is that much could have been done to minimize the damage by encouraging passengers and crew to stow breakables (many people had water carafes and glasses on slippery surfaces and those resulted in broken glass). Viking could even provide a checklist of things to do when heavy seas are expected or encountered.




20250113_095941




The captain kept mentioning that the “pounding” was a normal occurrence of the bow hitting the waves. I was curious how much different it was for those near the bow so I ventured to the port side of the pool deck (7th deck) at almost 10:00 where I could record the seas. Watch and you’ll see a huge splash as the bow hits a wave. Also, I’m not sure what it was that was hanging down, I noticed it wasn’t there later, so perhaps something else that had been damaged in the storm. I also took the opportunity to get more ice for my wife’s head.





Ship Damage





Damage was rather  extensive.  Not many people saw it because they were doing a lot of cleanup while passengers were encouraged to remain in their staterooms.







Damage in the pool area. Broken glass,  overturned tables, and contents spilled from cabinets and bookshelves.





Wintergarden Area damage






Aftermath of the First Big Rolls aboard the Viking Vela




While the pool area damage was the most striking, I noticed lots of bits of damage, including 4 washer/dryer units that toppled in the laundrette and damaged wall panels,






Notice the dented wall panels from the washer/dyers falling over.






The Aquavit lounge outdoor in the stern was pummeled with sailing marble-top tables and was smashed off its mounting, and much of it’s (quartz?) exterior was battered and smashed along with perhaps a half dozen shattered table tops. Indeed one of the outdoor glass barriers at the side of the stern port side was shattered, though still intact.

Finally the grand glass and steel staircase leading up from the Explorers lounge on the 7th deck in the bow had a large curved panel that was shattered and removed. The staircase was roped off for the rest of the cruise though I didn’t observe any other obvious damage to the stairway.

There were several places where either buckling or impacts from heavy falling items damaged the floor tiles. They replaced floor tiles near the starboard World Cafe entrance, at the starboard exit of the Explorers lounge. On the second floor there is a two-stage exit from the atrium to the outside of the ship. During the melee the forward most port side door was wide open (probably held so by the wind), and the inner sliding glass door was leaning inward with spray and was also half open with wind and rain howling in. I pushed the inner door into its channel to reduce the wind and spray – I wasn’t about to go near the outer door! However in the morning the right half of that sliding door had only a fifth of the bottom remaining the rest had apparently been sheared or broken off. I suspect the pounding from going into the waves is what did in that door as well as that large curved glass at the base of the Explorer Lounge stairway.





Altered Itinerary





It was clear our itinerary was going to be impacted. We believed it meant that Narvik would be removed from the schedule and instead we’d sail to Tromsø – the next planned port. But instead we remained in Ålesund for almost 5 days to allow for repairs an inspections and to avoid the still turbulent seas. Some speculated that the reason for remaining in port was to repair the Azipod drive/steering system, but that is unconfirmed.

We finally sailed out from Ålesund on the 7th day of the 13-day trip. However all the northern locations, and an interim planned excursion to Flåm were removed and instead we sailed south.

I was excited when they announced the trip to Flåm up a long fjord, but that too, was cancelled. Fortunately we did make it to Eidfjord which also had calm water and much better weather.





Alesund harbor at night.
Ålesund, Norway harbor at night





Eidfjord was Spectacular





Not only was the weather cooperative, but the setting was every bit as expansive and beautiful as I had imagined. It did make me sad that we didn’t get to see Narvik, Tromsø, or Alta because that fjord magic was perhaps the key thing we were interested in.





Eidfjord harbor at daybreak





The bow of the Viking Vela in the Hardanger fjord adjacent to Eidfjord.





The Aurora Did Show Up!





In the evening as we left Eidfjord at about 21:00 Norway time, the aurora was spotted to our stern and there was a great rush of folks to the aft and starboard side of the ship.





Eidfjord aurora above the Viking ship Vela.
A consolation aurora visible from the stern, starboard side of the ship on the way to Stavanger from Eidfjord.





Gallery of Cruisers






	

	
	

			
		

														
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These cruisers saw me taking photos and asked to be photographed under the agreement that their photos are displayed here publicly. Those people who are pictured are free to copy and use the photos in anyway they wish. I have added my copyright/watermark to them to prevent random pilfering, however unwatermarked photos are also available by clicking the watermarked ones (once I get it working!). Right click the image and select download to save it (or whatever is the equivalent on your browser of choice).





NOTE: If you would like for your photo(s) to be removed, please use the contact form on the site, send me an email asking for your photo(s) to be removed. Be sure to specify WHICH photo is of you, e.g. “NO20250119_6005” (or just _6005 for short). Allow up to 30 days for me to remove your photo as I travel and don’t always have access to the site.

About these photos: all these photos were taken with the following equipment and settings:
Sony A7RIII, 15-35mm f/2.8 Cannon lens, @17 mm, f/2.8, 3200 ISO, 8 seconds, Daylight white balance. None of the photos have been edited, they are straight out of the camera.





Course Departure





Due to the loss of Narvik, Tromsø and Alta, the ports of Eidfjord, mentioned above and Stavanger were added to the itinerary.





Stavanger port at sunrise





In Stavanger an excursion by boat to Pulpit Rock in the Lysefjord was one of my favorite side-trips.







The guide points out Pulpit Rock





Pulpit Rock (zoom)





One of several foss (waterfalls)











The original cruise had this itinerary:

1. London -> Amsterdam
2. Amsterdam 
3, 4 at sea 
5. Narvik
6, 7. Tromso (2 nights)
8, 9. Alta (2 nights)
10, 11. at sea
12, 13. Bergen




















The actual itinerary was this





1. London -> Amsterdam
2. Amsterdam 
3 at sea
4. confined to stateroom -> Alesund
5, 6, 7, 8. Alesund
9. Flam (canceled Alesund)
10. Eidfjord
11. Stavanger
12, 13. Bergen














External references to this event. 





Is Anybody on Board the Viking Vela Now (REDDIT)
Viking Vela Diverted for Repairs (Cruise Hive)
Viking Vela Stranded in Norway (Candid Cruise)





If you were on this ship for this or a subsequent cruise, feel free to comment, provide me with photos or videos and I can add them to this page.





I think it’s also fair to say that Viking initially offered every passenger a 60% fare voucher  toward any cruise booked within 1 year. This occurred once we faced our 3rd day stuck in Ålesund. However before departing the ship on the last day in Bergen, the voucher was increased to 100% – meaning, effectively that the cruise was 50% off IF you book another cruise.  The voucher excludes any shore excursions actually taken, and any self arranged hotel or airfare. Since we arranged our air travel and pre and post stays ourselves, that also would not be included. I suspect those wouldn’t have been included in the voucher even had they been booked as part of the cruise package.

Also, worth mentioning that Viking upgraded everyone to the “Silver Spirits” beverage package for free for the last half of the cruise. That comes to $50 per day for 2 people or about $350 value. That freebie unlocked some better wines, but not being much of a drinker we didn’t gain much value from the offer.





Before the Cruise – London





Having your plans dashed because of a plane delay is never fun, so we booked 3 pre-cruise days in London, and an extra post-cruise day in Bergen.  Also getting accommodated to a whole new timezone can be daunting. We stayed in the Shard (aka the Shangri-La) which is one of the tallest hotels in London. It was truly awesome and I believe a much better value than booking a pre-cruise stopover via Viking. 
Nearby were the London Bridge, the Tower Bridge, and the Eye of London – though the latter was closed for maintenance. One day was cold and rainy, the other days were merely cold.  A former co-worker and friend came to visit with us and took us on a tour of the surrounding area.  That was better than any tour we might have booked.







The Tower Bridge in the background with friends Kevin and Jennifer and my lovely wife, tricia… and me at the right.












London: The shard is at the left, the London Bridge in the center.





View from the 39th floor of the Shangri-La hotel. The Eye is at the upper left, the London Bridge at the right hand side.







London Center Train Depot





Queen Victoria Memorial





Beefeater at Buckingham Palace







Tower Bridge





Looking back onto London as we departed for Tillbury Port for the cruise.








About the images: I reserve all rights to use of these images for any commercial purpose. You may use them as backgrounds or wallpaper for your personal use, but any other use requires a license.  The majority of these images were taken with a Samsung S24 Ultra phone.



					

		
		
	

							
	

				

			
						

				Going Solar Part 2
			

										

					2 Replies				

					


				

			

Last Updated 2024-10-28





Before we jump back into solar, I’m going to tell you that wherever you see *aig* on an image caption, it means it is an Artificially Intelligence Generated image. Generally using gemini.google.com.  Had to dip my toe in the AI thing to help break up the longish paragraphs…





A typical winter day with a 13.6 kWh FranklinWH AC coupled battery, 18 Rec Alpha 410 Watt solar panels (7.36 kW) and Enphase IQ8 microinverters looks like Chart 1, below. Positive values are USAGE and negative values are EXPORTS except for the yellow (solar) production. Just before 8:00 AM you’ll notice a little cyan (house utilization) peak. This was partially offset by solar production (yellow) and part offset by import from the grid (purple).  After 3:30 PM another little cyan spike is partially offset by solar, and part battery discharge. See the legend for more details.





Chart 1: A typical winter day production with a battery system.
(1) Insufficient battery so drawing from the grid (purple).
(2) Using energy while the sun shines (cyan)
(3) Riding out the PEAK and night with battery (green)
(4) Charging battery (green) and exporting to the grid (purple)
(5) Battery charge percentage





System Quirks and “Gotcha’s”





There are a number of things that can go wrong or be wrong with your solar setup. Many revolve around what is observable/measured and what is not.
In particular, if your system is unable to see the big-picture consumption it may not behave as you expect, and you might, for example, get surprises from your utility company when they bill you for much more than you thought you’d be billed.





We’ve already thrown around the terms “kilowatts” (kW) and “kilowatt-hours” (kWh) like a pro, but let’s give them quick definitions.  A kilowatt is a thousand watts and is a measure of power.  An apt analogy to watts is the pressure in a water hose.  A kilowatt-hour is a measure of the AMOUNT of that power used in a given time. It is a measure of energy. In our hose analogy it would be the number of gallons or liters that are used from the hose over a given time.  And you might also remember that a watt is equal to 1 amp at 1 volt – but that’s not important here.





Excess Energy for Sale






Your utility may reject YOUR solar energy and may in fact try hard to prevent you from installing your own power production.  *aig*






Many people, especially those with solar-only systems assume that the best use of the excess energy is to feed it back to the utility company and get credit for it. But that’s less true every day. Typically there is an incentive for exporting excess but as solar energy becomes more prevalent, there is less incentive for a utility to WANT your energy, and they typically will not want to pay you for it. Some utilities won’t pay you for any energy you export as we described in Going Solar Part 1. Some utilities see your energy generation as competitive and are therefore hostile to having to pay anything for that energy (even though every kWh that you export they don’t have to generate and can sell to your neighbor at a hefty profit). In fact, at “grid scale” (very large) solar farms can produce energy at a cost of about $0.025 per kWh and they’d much rather charge you 33 cents for their 2.5 cent energy! As solar becomes more prevalent, a utility company is much more likely to incent you to send them energy when they are not able to produce it themselves (i.e. when the cheap wind and solar systems are NOT producing).

There are currently four major billing/reimbursement models:

Net Energy Metering – in the early versions of this model there is often a one-to-one correspondence between energy you use and energy you export. But the value of the energy is usually NOT a one-to-one credit, and can vary dramatically.

Net Energy Metering 2.0 – again, the specifics vary from location to location, but generally version 2.0 means you get SOME credit, less “non-bypassable” charges for energy you export. The 2.0 implies that the value of the export is roughly equivalent to the value of energy you import. Some utility companies (with the blessing of state public utility commissions) charge you the full rate for the electricity you consume and only periodically (once annually) credit you for the energy you export. The credit may be dollars or kWh and usually cannot be carried over to the next period.

Net Energy Metering 3.0 – generally this model is similar to 2.0, except it implies that the exported energy is credited at the “wholesale” rate and that rate is typically miniscule. Most 3.0 plans also run on monthly billing cycles, not the protracted cycles of 2.0.

Demand/Response Billing – this is a “wild ride” where the value of energy you consume (import) and the value of the energy you export are driven by current loads, time of day and the market forces. The rate can swing dramatically at 15 minute intervals. And curiously there are some times of day when you can be PAID to consume energy (because there is excess load on the grid and the power needs to go somewhere). This method of billing is not very common for residential customers in the US, but it is “behind the curtain” of all of the utility companies. The California Independent System Operator {CAISO}, for example has fascinating graphs of the costs of energy. I am aware that in the UK Octopus Energy has several plans including a demand/response plan that they call Agile. The US Department of Energy has details on other Demand/Response plans, but I notice the majority of them are only available to large energy-using businesses.





Chart 2: The wild world of wholesale energy pricing. The “LMP” (Local Marginal Prices per Megawatt-hour) can be both positive (e.g. $14 for Kirkwood, and New Spice), and negative as shown here for San Mateo, Curtis and Morgan Hill). I’ve filtered out the higher costs, but at this same time the highest energy costs in this area were $67 for Hollister. The average cost is $10.97 across the region. ($0.011 per kWh!)





Not for-profit utilities will prefer to get their energy at the lowest cost so they can charge a lower cost.  There are a few utilities that offer plans to those with batteries that allows them to discharge your battery to the grid to help with load imbalances.  These arrangements are referred to as Virtual Power Plants (VPP) and as battery adoption and capacity ramps up, this strategy could save utilities BILLIONS of dollars in cost – because, well, customers have borne the cost of the batteries themselves.   OhmConnect was formed to be a VPP of a different sort.  I participated aggressively with them until my solar system made it impractical. OhmConnect is a large base of people who agree to reduce energy usage at specific times in order to gain incentives (like cash and prizes).  A utility that can coax the batteries of hundreds or thousands of customers into helping them out is a powerful tool. Of course such plans usually come with monetary incentives, too, below is one example.  

Enrolled battery systems will be directed to discharge every day from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. during the months of August through October, a critical window when energy needs are highest in California. In exchange, customers will receive an upfront payment of $750 and a free smart thermostat for participating. 
~ Sunrun announcement






The utility company taking kilowatts out of your battery 🙂 .   *aig*






Would I trust my utility company to use my battery and energy wisely? NO! However some installers, a FEW battery manufactures and a FEW utility companies are adopting virtual power plants (VPPs). Tesla, Sunrun, and sonnen are some of the battery manufactures with such arrangements. FranklinWH and Enphase have announced plans, but have not yet rolled out this potentially game changing technology as best I can tell.  Feel free to leave a comment if you know otherwise!





_______________________________________________________________________






Electricity is like apples. Your utility company can only count what you send them, not how many you pick. *aig*






How Do Utilities Determine My Net Usage?





Why doesn’t your utility company credit you for all the energy you generate LESS the amount that you use?  Unless you have multiple meters the utility company only sees your exported energy AFTER your house consumes what it wants. The analogy I like is this: you pick a basketful of apples from your tree. You use some of those apples to make pies, some to make applesauce and you give the remaining apples to your neighbor. Your neighbor is grateful for the apples, but doesn’t know how many apples you originally picked, only that they got half a basketful.  The utility is like your neighbor, only less friendly – and the apples in this analogy are kilowatt-hours of electricity.





By the way this same “net usage” principle is why a partial backup battery solar system may only see SOME of your usage as we mentioned in Quirks, above.





The Kilowatts are Stacked Against You






The ratios may be stacked against you. *aig*






Before assuming that selling electricity back to the utility is your best option, pay attention to the rates.  In Northern California and many areas of the country your electricity cost has at least two components: the cost of generation of the energy (free in the case of solar – discounting amortization and maintenance of the equipment), and the cost of distributing that energy over the poles and towers, under the ground, through the transformers and wires that comprise the grid.  As explained earlier, some utilities will give a FULL credit for what you export, some will give full credit less “Non-bypassable” charges – including “minimum delivery charges”. Unpopular plans, like NEM (Net Energy Metering) 3.0 in California mean that excess energy is reimbursed at a paltry $0.05 per kilowatt hour.  But the minimum cost to import that energy is about $0.35 per kWh.  Under NEM 3.0 to break even you have to export 6 to 12 times as much energy as you import. Ah, but it is costly and not allowed by most utilities to generate that much EXTRA energy, and nor is it practical to do so, especially in the winter.  It’s also worth noting that if you are connected to the grid there is some cost to maintain that grid and the utility needs to recoup that cost in order to provide you a service.





These factors create a problem just as with roadways that are funded with gasoline taxes. Less gasoline consumption equals less road funding = deteriorating roads for all drivers. Less electric energy consumption from the utility results in less funds for maintenance of the grid. It’s also a bit unfair to those in apartments or with insufficient income to afford their own solar generation – because those folks are “left behind” to pay for those grid maintenance costs.





The one thing I will leave you with in this discussion, however, is that you almost always will get more value out of USING that energy than it sending it back to the utility. Some ways to do that are described in “Energy Hacks”, below.





Battery Or No Battery?





Chart 1 again… 





A close look at Chart 1, you’ll notice that the battery system (green graph) is providing all of the energy to run the house after the sun gives out around 3:30 PM in the winter.
Moreover, the battery is being charged from about 8:20 AM until the battery is fully charged at about 1 PM. Thereafter excess energy is then sent back to the grid. You can even tell from the graph that the energy sent back to the grid on this relatively productive winter day is less than the amount of energy imported in the morning (1).
Another take away – the battery didn’t discharge from midnight on because it was set to maintain a minimum 25% charge for emergencies. In this case setting that minimum lower (e.g. 5%) may have avoided ALL of the grid imports on this day!

One obvious takeaway is that the battery is charged “for free” and is used to cover the cost of energy from 3 PM through midnight. Indeed for our home system that energy will generally last until about 2:30 PM the following day. That means for this winter cycle we use ALMOST *NO* energy from the utility at all!   One reason energy was imported (other than the 25% reserve) is that the prior day production was low. Notice how the battery level at the end of this day was 60%, but it was only 25% in the morning.





Even if you have a great energy export rate, a well sized battery can prevent almost all import costs!  










Some assume that with JUST a battery they can MAKE money by buying it at off-peak rates and selling it back at peak rates (provided that option exists). And yes, that CAN work, but usually won’t unless these things are true:





    

  1. The rate differential is at least 15% (charging and discharging the battery incurs an average 11 to 14% LOSS). Don’t believe the 6% or 11% figures – those are under IDEAL conditions.  My actual loss from December 2023 to October 2024 was 14.6% –  calculated as follows 1 – (total_discharge_kWh / total_charge_kWg) = 1 – (2602 / 3029)
    2. 




  2. You can actually GET a higher export value for exported energy (or a higher value than the import cost).
    3. 




  3. You do not have to then also IMPORT energy during the peak period, or a significant amount of off-peak energy.
    4. 




  4.  You are able to export energy while also supplying your home. Remember the apple analogy? If your home load is high, both the battery discharge capacity, and the home load consumption will prevent you from discharging.  For example, if your battery discharge rate is 5 kW and you’re running a 4 kW oven, the MOST you’ll be able to discharge is 1 kW.
    5. 






Let’s do some quick math on the these points to make it clear.  Let’s divide the day up between off-peak, generation time (the sun is shining and producing ample energy to supply the home), and peak (non-generation) periods a typical home may use 10 kWh during generation time (all of which is offset by solar production), 7 kWh during PEAK non-generation time, and another 10 kWh during the remaining time (which is usually also off-peak like late night and early morning where there is no generation).  Let’s further assume peak rates are $0.50, off peak $0.30.  The energy you would need for the non-generation period totals 17 kWh: $3.50 is peak, $3.00 is off peak.

We have these three choices: 





(A) Use the energy in self consumption mode only (don’t discharge to the grid unless the battery is fully charged);
(B) FULLY (as much as possible) discharge the battery to the grid during the peak and earn per kWh exported;  
(C) Limit exports so that you only discharge as much energy to the grid as is NOT needed to offset off-peak usage.  

The last strategy isn’t easy to implement, because we have to guess how much energy will be required through the peak and off peak periods until generation resumes. The best strategy depends on the USABLE battery size and the export rate.







If the export rate is less than the off peak import rate, exporting energy only makes sense after there is no non solar peak or off-peak energy to offset.







Compare Table 1 with a favorable export rate and Table 2 with an unfavorable export rate below. Both are daily comparisons at different battery sizes, utilization and rates.  Two obvious takeaways are that a battery CAN save if there is a good export rate (Table 1).  The size of the battery relative to non-solar use dictates how much savings are possible.  In both cases the maximum savings/earnings are achieved if there is sufficient battery to cover all PEAK and off peak usage. In Table 1, Exporting All possible energy during Peak is clearly the winner, but a Limited Export strategy also works – but no strategy has a positive cashflow unless the battery is > 18 kWh. That’s not to say a smaller battery is of no help, compare the 0 sized battery to the others and all battery options reduce the net cost by about $2 to $5 per day.





Usable Battery SizeSelf ConsumeExport ALL PeakLIMIT Export
0-6.50-6.50-6.50
5-4.30-4.30-4.30
10-2.46-1.92-2.46
2003.360.36
Table 1: Battery Usage Options at $0.60 Export rate; 
7 kWh @ 0.50 peak and 10 kWh @$0.30 off peak





If the export rate is unfavorable (e.g. $0.05 in the case of NEM 3.0), then limited export or self consumption are the best choice, – if the battery is sufficiently large.  Trying to export energy is a money losing strategy.  However as in the prior case ANY battery will reduce the costs!





Usable Battery SizeSelf ConsumeExport AllLimit Export
0 -4.90 -4.90 -4.90
5 -2.70 -2.70 -2.70
10 -1.26 -2.21 -1.26
20 0 -1.77 0.23
Table 2: NEM 3.0 ($0.05 Export rate); 
5 kWh @$0.50 peak and 8 kWh @ $0.30 off 





Partial Or Full Backup?





When installing a battery system there are a number of constraints. Most them were described in Part 1, but briefly: there are three important specifications:  total capacity in kWh, peak discharge rate in kW, and sustained discharge rate in kW.  Because of these limitations, it’s often recommended to install a PARTIAL back up system where some number of circuits (essential circuits) are covered by the battery should the grid go down, and the other (non-essential) circuits lose power.  The reasons to NOT backup things include:  a very high starting or sustained energy draw (e.g. an AC, Heat Pump or pool pump motor) vs a desire to protect things like refrigerators, lights and comfort power like TVs, routers and commonly used lights.







But there is an often UNDOCUMENTED sinister side to this arrangement. Specifically a battery system can normally see all the solar inputs, the battery charge and discharge and the use of the essential circuits. But unless monitoring devices called “CTs” (current transformers) are installed, the system cannot see the rest of the circuits. This creates three problems:

1. Your system won’t know how much energy you are actually using… so what your system says you imported or exported from the grid is NOT what the utility company sees and this can be confusing.  If you refer to Chart 3 below, you can see that energy coming from the grid that does NOT go through the solar/battery panel isn’t observable by the components that come after the solar/battery breaker.
2. Normally battery systems are configured to charge the battery with excess solar production (meaning energy would flow back to the grid). However because the system doesn’t see the non-essential consumption, it may elect to charge the battery instead of using the solar energy to run your air conditioner or space heater.
3. You won’t be able to know how much energy you are using at any given time with the system app. This makes it harder to chase down energy hogs.





Chart 3: A Line diagram of a solar system with a battery backup that can run when the grid is down.
1. The main meter/grid power.
2. The breaker that ties the grid to the solar/battery system. Other breakers/circuits in this panel are NOT backed up.
3. The internal disconnect. If there is no power coming in, the FranklinWH aGate (brains) throws a “switch” disconnecting the solar and battery from the grid.
4. The “essential loads” panel which is backed up and will continue to run if there is solar power OR battery power (or both).
5. The solar panel “combiner” box – attaches to the panels on the roof.
6. The FranklinWH aPower (battery).
NOTE: I elected NOT to connect the AC to a smart circuit and instead plan to connect an EV charger.










In my home system we elected to NOT include a radiant under-tile floor heater, the AC and 8 or so other circuits, unfortunately including what we thought was an “unused” bathroom plug that is the source of the power to our security cameras. One take away here… make sure you know what ALL your circuits control before making choices for a 
partial backup system.

As you might guess, the floor heating system uses some significant power when it’s running for 5-6 hours a day and 850 watts per hour is up to 5.1 kWh per day or 153 kWh per month ($51 at the best off-peak rates)!  It was more than a little disappointing when we got our electricity bill for the first full month and saw a LOT more imported energy than we expected.  Mind you the bill was about 10% of what we had paid the previous year, so we weren’t complaining much.  We plan to move this circuit to the backup panel to avoid the “gotcha” since we clearly have sufficient battery to make it possible.

However the other catch to this situation is that WHEN one uses power matters.  (See Energy Hacks, below).





Energy Hacks





I see lots of commercials about doing your laundry, running your dishwasher and charging your EV at late night or morning.  That makes sense if you have to pay to import energy because it moves those activities to the lower rate period. However the LOWEST rate period for a solar system is when it’s producing enough energy to cover the consumption… that is DURING DAYLIGHT hours. So that proverb about making hay while the sun shines, applies also to electricity usage.






If you have solar energy… use it while you have it! *aig*






The MOST cost effective way to use generated energy is use it when it’s sufficient to run your appliances… Most of the time that will be from about 11:30 AM to about 2:30 PM and even later in the summer months. You’ll have no conversion losses (except from the DC power on the roof to the AC power for your house). However its a good idea to make sure there is sufficient energy to also charge the battery system in case you need it for an emergency outage, and to avoid the peak rates which start right about sunset.  For a bigger battery, it’s optimal to gain enough charge to see your home through all the peak and off peak hours until generation begins again.  Another trick is to stage your heavy appliance usage such as doing the washer and dryer loads before or after you may need that power for your air conditioner. Indeed, tracking when you have excess solar production can be quite helpful to saving energy.





When Do I Have Excess Solar?





Ideally there would be an easy to use automation that does useful things like charge the EV, run the AC, and more WHEN there is more energy available from the sun than is needed.  Figuring that out manually is doable IF you can see the actual energy from the viewpoint of your utility in real time.  I ended up using Emporia Utility Connect, and Emporia VUE energy monitors to supplement my monitoring regimen because my partial-backup FranklinWH system doesn’t see the full picture. Either or both of those tools paired with Emporia Smart Plugs allow me to do some automation.  One of those is a “Greener Hack” I describe below. 





Optimizing Payback (Getting Paid for Excess)





We touched on the “export” option, but the gist is pretty simple. Unless you can export energy at a greater profit than the cost to import it, it doesn’t make sense to try to export energy to offset your bill.  Under NEM 3.0 a strategy of extreme self consumption is usually most cost effective, and the least prone to rate changes.





Getting a Little Greener





Our house has a natural gas furnace. It is not “green” by any means, but it runs well, and because our blower/thermostat IS battery backed up, we can heat our home even if  there is no grid power. However watching electricity flowing back to the utility made me realize I could do even better!

I bought three 750/1000W space heaters with mechanical thermostats and NO remote control. Notice the maximum energy usage is 1000 Watts which is 8.3 amps at 120 Volts.  I paired each of them with Emporia Smart Plugs that have a maximum sustained usage of 10 amps (1200 Watts).  Why mechanical thermostats? Because most of the fancy heaters these days – especially those with remote controls will NOT come on when the power comes on.  Those with mechanical thermostats can be set up so that when the power is on, they will run and produce heat up to the maximum mechanical thermostat setting WITHOUT needing intervention.






*aig*






IMPORTANT Safety NOTE: Your smart plugs generally can NOT handle a typical space heater load. Nor should you use extension cords or power strips. The typical extension cord and power strip is undersized for the current used by a space heater and may overheat and catch fire.
BEWARE!










Using the Emporia App, I set up those smart plugs in the “Excess Solar” option.  I’m not entirely sure how their algorithm works, and I had a few surprises, but mostly it seems to work.

Here are some screenshots from the Emporia app.






A smart plug configured to turn on when there is excess solar. Notice the Cyan color indicating it’s on. This smart plug just turns a lamp on to let us know when we have energy to “burn” on things like laundry and space heater.






The configuration of “Excess Solar Management” looks like this.  It is under the “Connect” device which watches what our meter is reporting to our utility company in real time.






This is how the smart plugs are configured. “Excess Solar Indicator” is turned on if there is excess solar followed by each of the items listed and “on”. It can also change the living room thermostat.







The “meter” status with one of the space heater plugs overlaid on it. The app, unfortunately doesn’t let you plot more than one thing at a time.






Time of Use Plans and Battery Systems





Curiously, my experience is that most systems (FranklinWH, Enphase, and more) don’t take FULL advantage of rates. In the FranklinWH system for example, I had to set up a plan to force my system to NOT import during the off-peak time and instead import during a “super-off-peak time” which I created.  This rate doesn’t actually exist, but the problem is that off-peak is Midnight to 3 PM. But charging the battery at midnight means burning money by importing from the grid. However if I force it to wait until noon, then my solar system gets a crack at charging the battery for FREE before the Time of Use plan drinks costly juice from my utility.  And if the sun has been insufficient to the task, it makes sense to spend a couple of hours charging the battery before the “Mid Peak” and “Peak” rates kick in and drain more from my wallet.  But this is true for me because my off-peak rate is $0.334 but the summer peak rate is an appalling $0.724 – that’s more than enough difference in rates to make up for the roundtrip losses using the battery. Setting this up in the current FranklinWH app is a bit too tedious to explain, unfortunately. I’d point you to Reddit where it’s been discussed. When you switch between modes or edit the Time of Use schedule and rates watch it carefully!  I made a mistake and instead of playing out my battery at off-peak, it elected to import from the grid to cover my household use instead.  My utility company netted an extra $2 a day from me due to that mistake!





Questions To Ask





If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably wondering… what questions should I ask my installer, and what things should I try to discover for myself.












    

  1. How long have you been in business? When did you do your first residential solar panel installation? When did you do your first do a solar + battery system?  How many total installations have you done to date? Is residential or commercial solar systems your primary company focus?
    2. 




  2. Are you the company that will do the installation? Or are you a broker, or reseller, or sales organization? If the installer, do you have a C-10 Electrical contractors license?
    3. 




  3. Do you stock equipment like solar panels, inverters and batteries?
    4. 




  4. What is a typical work-start to system-completion timeframe, currently?  What causes the bulk of that time to pass?
    5. 




  5. Do you do warranty repairs, or monitoring of the systems you install?
    6. 




  6. Is the crew you use your employees, or do you contract out some or all of the work?
    7. 




  7. Are your skilled workers paid competitive rates?
    > Why this question? An increasing number of utilities (e.g. Pacific Gas and Electric) will not certify/allow interconnect if the workers are not paid “competitively”.
    8. 




  8. Can you quote me systems that optimize my return on investment?  Please be sure to include the expected total cost over 5, 10, 15 and 20 years. (This is especially important if you are thinking of getting a lease, a Power Purchase Agreement, or financing the purchase with a loan).
    9. 




  9. Do your estimates and financial models include degradation of components like solar panels, batteries and inverters?  What annual energy cost increase (or decrease) is assumed in the model?
    > A model that assumes NO cost increases may be conservative, but might also be more accurate than one that outrageously assumes cost increases.
    10. 




  10. Tell me how you affix racks and panels to my roof. What methods do you use and what guarantees do you have regarding roof penetrations and roof leaks.
    11. 




  11. Does the system you propose have tools that will make it easy for me to monitor and track my daily and monthly energy consumption?  I.e. can I expect the system to agree with my utility company to within, say 5%?
    12. 




  12. Why did you propose these panels, inverters (and batteries) over others?  
    > It may be familiarity, cost, or availability that leads them in one direction or another. And it might be profit.
    13. 




  13. Do you have any reference accounts for a system similar to the one you are proposing that I can compare daily and monthly costs with my own? Preferably another house in the same area or neighborhood?
    14. 






If any of those questions make your proposer/installer hesitate, I’d suggest treating them with circumspection.  Also, it’s rather useful to get more than one estimate from more than one installer because two estimates sometimes reveal things you may not think about. For example one estimate might include a larger battery and a smaller number of panels or vice versa. 





Finally my $0.02 on the cost: it’s unwise to try to pay the “lowest possible cost”. If you want your installer to stay in business to support you and do repairs under warranty, you need to pay them enough to make a profit that keeps them in business.





Disclaimer of Warranty and Stuff





If you’ve got general questions, I’m a night photography guy who is nerdy enough to dig into the minutia of things like this. I’m not making myself available to answer every (or any) question you may have. But I can recommend some resources worth looking into.

* Reddit subgroups [Solar, FranklinWH, Enphase, Electrical, EmporiaEnergy]
* YouTube Channels: [Gary Does Solar some very practical advice from a Brit, Solar Time with Martyna – some interesting comparisons of panels and the effects of shading)

Related Topics:
   * Tech Connections: My Furnace is Too Big; Your HOUSE can Store Energy, too 

If you want to ask, feel free to ask. If I see enough interest in a direction I’d like to go, there might be a third article in this series!