Touring in the rain

Have a good rain jacket or coat with a hood. The hood replaces the need for an umbrella.

I like a raincoat plus an umbrella because if it’s a downpour, the raincoat does not protect my pants and shoes.

I use this mini umbrella:

https://davekny.com/products/the-davek-mini?srsltid=AfmBOop-KNYF5pfPI6rT7mTmoR3QfvZBFhJErF4OG-QxxbzinlNVWf1j

Hopefully, you’ll get lucky with the weather and wont need either. I was in Portugal last March and it only rained for a few hours.

I'm a fan of the 96-97% nylon slacks sold by Eddie Bauer, Columbia, PrAna, etc. They are not waterproof, but they do a pretty good job of shedding rain. If I expect to encounter weather that's both cool and wet, I wear long johns underneath (usually merino wool), which further reduces the cold-and-clammy feeling.

At home I'd be wearing a full-length raincoat, but I don't normally take one of those to Europe, because it's such a pain to deal with when you don't need to be wearing it. I'm not one who goes back to my hotel in the middle of the day to drop off a coat. So a rain jacket it is, for almost all my trips.

Wear grippy shoes.
I found the sidewalks in Portugal particularly slippery, and the hills make it worse.

Hoods, raincoats, and umbrellas have their places.

Generally, light rain doesn’t prevent us from doing anything. If it’s a heavy rain we try to visit indoors places. For those occasions when there are no indoors sites, we tend to shorten or skip that place and try to visit at another time. For example, in Spain last year it was a torrential downpour when I wanted to see a specific house in a small village. I braved the rain to go see the house and my wife stayed in the car. The next day the weather was better so we returned when it wasn’t raining.

Unpredictable weather is a reason we don’t plan itineraries day by day/hour by hour. Rather, we make a list of things we want to see or visit in a location, then visit them according to the weather when we’re there.

These are great and helpful.
I bought the same shoes my son wore to walk the Pacific Crest Trail and that should be helpful on those streets. It looks to be raining most every day, but I will consider it a new type of adventure and go with the flow. Thanks.

Keep in mind that it probably won’t be rainy all day, every day. If you’re lucky it will rain at night when you’re sleeping, or only for short periods. On only a few of our trips has it rained all day. On one of those days in 2022 in the UK’s Lake District we drove to Cartmel for sticky toffee pudding, Grasmere for gingerbread, and did laundry. My point is, when given lemons, make lemonade. Don’t let it spoil your day or trip.

If you wear glasses, consider wearing a baseball cap underneath a raincoat hood to keep the glasses dry.

Oh yes, good advice from Amy. I am not a ball cap wearer but wore one in Orkney a few years ago it it helped a lot. I have now gotten a waterproof ball cap to wear under my rain jacket as the non-waterproof one got soaked quickly even under the hood.

It probably depends on where you're from, for me it was still so warm and humid in the rain that I was glad I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt under my raincoat. The rain was still heavy one of the days and I was sweating. My rain jacket has zippers under the armpits that I can open to allow air flow while still keeping me dry and I had them fully unzipped. And a ballcap as mentioned to keep rain off of your glasses.

*don't underestimate how slippery the sidewalks get in Lisbon when they're wet.