L'Estartit, Spain

Sunday 28July

L'Estartit, Spain

We all made an early start today, we needed to be up and on the road by 9 00am, we made it by 9.30 which was pretty good going.  We packed 'lightly' - there were 7 of us.  This was a kind of practice run for our holiday in Switzerland, Jamie's car, a big people mover, had a 'pod' on the roof rack with all our clothes, etc,  plus a bike stand beside the pod, and behind the back two seats were the bags of food, toys/games, and togs and towels, and we were all comfortably seated.  So that works..

We were headed for Collioure for lunch, "Ken" James' GPS man estimated we would be there  just after 12.  It was a lovely drive, the motorway system is a breeze and the countryside so pretty, lots of little farmlets and fields upon fields of yellow sunflowers, some wheat fields and some corn, but mainly sunflowers.  

So Ken was right, we turned off the motorway and drove into this lovely medieval fishing port of Collioure, just around 12. Poor Penelope was feeling a bit car sick, and Hannah's DVD had finished so we were all ready to leap out and stretch our legs.  Well, if it hadn't been for wall to wall cars all seeking parks down narrow twisting roads, we would have been soaking in the history of this amazing little place, but as it was James managed to squeeze out of the jam and drove up the hill

 

where we managed to take some photos, but we couldn't park there so moved on to the next bay,

 

Port Vendres which was a little less crowded and just as interesting.  We had our sandwiches sitting on the wharf watching the boats go by.

There was a lovely old church on the other side of the wharf and as we walked up to the toilets we heard the bells ringing and saw the people coming out of the church dressed in their Sunday best.  Then we had our first horrendous toilet experience , it wasn't that they had been built into the side of the cutting by the road (like a cave) or that they didn't have modern wc's with big metal doors with a urinal inbetween, or that the tiled walls and floors were slippery and wet, it was that as soon as the entrance door closed behind you there was no light, the cubicles were pitch black so you had to grope around to find the toilet and then do what you had to do, there was no knowing what others before you had done!! Gross!!  No toilet paper of course and no hand dryer.  We didn't have a choice about whether to go or not, so we tackled it as a team with someone guarding the entrance door and someone holding the cubicle door open so that at least you could see the toilet in a dimly lit sort of way!

And then we were off again, up onto the motorway heading for Spain.  We left the sunflowers behind and entered the grape growing countryside, fields upon fields of vines, it wasn't long before we passed through the border into Spain.  It was strange how the countryside changed almost straight away, it was hilly and vegetation was course scrub for quite a few k's, then as the countryside became flatter the occasional cultivated areas became more frequent, this time it was olive groves, corn, wheat and the odd pocket of pineapples.  It wasn't long before Ken had us leaving the motorway and heading out to the coast through some sleepy little towns with dusty sun baked haciendas with bright colourful bougainvillea bushes reminding you that this was Spain.

We saw the sign "L'Estartit" and drove around the roundabout admiring the quaintness of these old buildings and craning our necks to catch any sign of our hotel, in fact we went round the roundabout quite a few times, I think we tried every road off the roundabout and became familiar with this little town already. Yes, our hotel does have a car park and a swimming pool.  Ken was getting a little frustrated with us, so ok if he wants us to turn right up this little 'medieval' narrow street maybe there is a modern hotel at the end of it,  "yeah right".  So this street isn't just a street where two bicycles would have to be careful not to knock each other off it's so narrow, this street is a maze of streets, with sharp right hand turns and blind corners and intersecting streets where people who live there never look both ways because there is never anything but foot traffic!!  As we tried not to scrape the car side mirrors on the sides of the houses the residents acted like they'd seen this all before, in fact one old woman was sitting on her stool outside her front door with her feet firmly planted on the ground, and I swear I don't know how James didn't run over her feet, and then a scrawny cat made its feelings known by crouching down on the road in front of us and leaving its mark for us to drive over.  

Well by this time James was getting all the advice imaginable from inside the car and Ken wasn't at all pleased either.  We all pulled together as a team and chose the best road to turn sharp right down to the main city road.  At best it was an uninformed guess, we thought we might be stuck in this maze forever - literally stuck!  How James manoeuvred this 'way-out-of-proportion' vehicle, shuffling backwards and forwards, ignoring the shrieks from the team and the cars incessant beep beeping as we got ever closer to scraping the paint off the car, I'll never know - oh yes I do, he has had years of practice manoeuvring planes in and out of hangers! So yes we did choose a road that took us down to the roundabout again and then Rach gets the hotel address up on her iPhone and "barbie" tells us that L'Estartit is another 10 mins, take the second exit right at the roundabout! And so we left Torroella de Montgsi and 10 mins later pulled up outside our hotel in L'Estartit, (it takes a woman!).

Our hotel apartment was absolutely lovely, clean, cool and with air conditioning, big kitchen/dining area with balcony overlooking the swimming pool, a double room with en suite and a single bedroom, plus upstairs two beds and a balcony in the roof, also overlooking the swimming pool. So plenty of room for us to spread out and relax after our adventures.  Needless to say the children were changed and into the pool in a flash, we finished unpacking and Rach and I went to check out a restaurant for dinner, and the beach, and of course the colourful touristy type shops.  It was interesting to notice that most of the accents we heard were British - shades of "Ibiza"?

It was after 7 when we all went out for our meal, there's something about strolling around at that time of night in the warm afterglow of a hot day, our restaurant was pretty full, even at that time of night, but they quickly found us a table.  We had a variety of tapas dishes and paella, washed down with a carafe of sangria for Rach and James and a bottle of wine for David and me.  The children also had huge ice creams to finish off.  The atmosphere in the restaurant was busy, bustling, lively and fun.  A lovely way to end our first day in Spain.