One funny story that Steve told us while he was driving us from Palau Saverdera to Figueres was about a litigious woman who they called "Claimerella."
But back to the present (now the past) -- for dinner, we had the fixed price menu: for starters, almond vichysoisse
and fries with egg and bits of some kind of Spanish ham. Both sounded weird but both were good. The soup had a drizzle of olive oil and toasted almonds on it; the fries had a balsamic vinegar reduction. Our main courses were veal entrecôte (a disappointment)
and pork tenderloin with applesauce (not applesauce like we know it in America; rather, a sauce based on apples). For dessert we had a bread pudding and a macedonia (there's that mixed fruit again).
We were back in room around 9:30, in bed around 10 and awake at 3:30 for the 4:30 shuttle to the airport. It was jam packed full of people.
When we got to the Barcelona airport to take our flight to Amsterdam (Schiphol), we checked in at the machines to get our boarding passes, and then stood in line to check our baggage. We were originally not seated together, and the machines hadn't been able to offer us any alternatives. But the clerk at the desk actually ASKED us if we wanted to be together, and moved us in an exit row (funny, the machine was going to charge us 30 euros apiece for those seats).
Security was easy: no separate check of liquids and no shoes off.
We started boarding 15 minutes before scheduled time and everything was very civilized. We did experience a bit of a delay coming out of the gate because five people who had checked baggage apparently never got on the plane, so we had to wait while their baggage was taken off.
Linda had a tight (1 hour) connction to start with, and the slight delay had narrowed the window somewhat, and we arrived at the C gates and had to hoof it over to the E gates. We had to pass through another passport check, but there was a special line for people whose flights were due to depart in 30 minutes or less, so Linda went through those. Lisa also got through quickly and was able to catch up with Linda before Linda boarded her flight. We hugged and both said what a wonderful trip it had been; we were both sad to be done with it. It went fast, it was interesting, it was fun...and it seemed EASY.
Lisa had hoped to buy some duty-free perfume, but they were already boarding her flight (originally scheduled for a 10:25 departure and then moved up to 10:15. Lisa went to the duty free shop, hoping to make a surgical strike, but there was a huge line at the cash register, so she decided to forget it.
It was a case of hurry up and wait, and at the end of the wait, there were individual interviews with gentlemen who came to get you out of line personally, check your passport again, ask where you'd been, whether you'd packed your own luggage, whether you'd had it with you the whole time...and then there was another baggage scan, this time with fluids needing to be taken out. Went through one of those body imaging scanners (left shoes on) but got patted down for my watch and my passport holder that I was wearing inside my shirt.
Another delay: flight now due to depart at 10:45. Everyone boarded quickly when the time came...and then there was another issue -- the plane needed to take on more fuel. Apparently there had been a problem related to the fact that the plane that had been at this gate just previously had left late. And then there was confusion with the paperwork...not sure what time we actually left (after the Atlanta debacle, looking at the clock was not a priority), but given the time we are now due to get into seattle (1:22 pm), we must have departed sometime around 12:10 pm.
I guess this is the final entry of this Catalonia blog. It's been an interesting experience. Thanks to Paul for the inspiration and to Peter for being such a good audience. And to Linda for checking my work, helping me to remember what I'd forgotten, and for being such a great travel companion. I love you all.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Friday, October 7, 2011
Last leg(s)
The train trip from Figueres to Barcelona was uneventful. We managed to leave the train station by the wrong door (we went out the direction we came, which turns out to be where the cabs drop off people, but not pick them up -- pickups are on the other side of the building.
The taxi driver had apparently never heard of the Hotel FrontAir Congress, near the airport, but he punched the address into his GPS (Linda had printed the confirmation from Expedia) and got us there, and for about 21 euros instead of the 35 we expected. We never used an ATM here, and we still have about 50 euros (we came with 300 between the two of us). It's been easy to put things on credit cards (though the train ticket machine would only take a debit card, we finally figured out). We even put the taxi fare on a credit card.
Lisa had already determined that there was a restaurant with "Wok" in the name close to our hotel (thank you, Google Maps on iPhone), so we walked over there for lunch. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet with sushi, fried food like shrimp chips, fish, squid legs...we also had cold dishes like baby octopus, a seafood salad, olives and cornichons... There was wokked/Mongolian barbecue with lots of different (huge mushrooms, seafood, skewers of chicken and beef... We even had some dessert: melon, ice cream, what must have been canned lychees (seasoned with something like cinnamon), and coconut balls that were not to our taste. We paid for that with a credit card, too. There was a big banquet area downstairs, and a whole upstairs too...gigantic place.
In fact, gigantic is the byword of this place. The hotel is gigantic, our room is gigantic compared to what we've gotten used to over the past couple of weeks, and it's in a gigantic shopping center. We explored a sporting goods store called Decathalon that looks like a Big 5 and an REI got together and had a gigantic baby. There was everything: toe shoes, hunting gear, golf clubs, athletic clothing and shoes, fishing gear, ping pong rackets -- maybe the only thing they didn't have was dive gear. Or maybe we didn't see it.
We skipped the electronics store and took a quick trip through Babies R'Us/Toys are Us. It looked much the same as at home, but some of the prices were outrageous - we saw a car seat for 369 euros!
There was also a clothing store that we trotted through, and then we went into Al Campo (which Lisa had noticed as we'd approached the hotel in the cab -- it's the same store as Auchan in France. It also turned out that there was a mall in there.
But Al Campo was amazing. Huge, wide, long aisles full of all the foods a Spaniard could ever want. Hams (complete with hooves) of all sorts, cheeses (small ones up to huge wheels), frozen foods (tapas, sushi, meats, pizzas), empanadas, a gorgeous fresh fish section with live lobsters, clams, snails, mussels, fish...we walked through the store for two hours before we decided we were tired and just couldn't do any more. We probably only got about a quarter of the way through the store, and we hardly looked at the clothing, housewares, etc. We saw most of the refrigerated and frozen foods, and the produce (which was actually the least interesting thing there) but didn't even get to the cans and boxes and bags of food. It was just too much. We took lots of pictures. The yogurt section alone was bigger than any entire dairy section in any supermarket in the states (maybe Walmart is bigger; haven't been).
We came back to the room (impeded slightly by a half-dozen Swedes with golf clubs). The other impediment to reaching our room is that you have to put your room key in a slot in the elevator, then punch the button for your floor, and then usually (but not always) key in the secret code 2030. Maybe we'll get it right the third time around, after dinner, which we are planning to eat in the hotel right at 8 pm when they open, because...
We have to get up at 3:30 am to get the 4:30 am shuttle to the airport (which we can see from here) in order to catch our 6:30 am flight to Amsterdam. Ugh.
The taxi driver had apparently never heard of the Hotel FrontAir Congress, near the airport, but he punched the address into his GPS (Linda had printed the confirmation from Expedia) and got us there, and for about 21 euros instead of the 35 we expected. We never used an ATM here, and we still have about 50 euros (we came with 300 between the two of us). It's been easy to put things on credit cards (though the train ticket machine would only take a debit card, we finally figured out). We even put the taxi fare on a credit card.
Lisa had already determined that there was a restaurant with "Wok" in the name close to our hotel (thank you, Google Maps on iPhone), so we walked over there for lunch. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet with sushi, fried food like shrimp chips, fish, squid legs...we also had cold dishes like baby octopus, a seafood salad, olives and cornichons... There was wokked/Mongolian barbecue with lots of different (huge mushrooms, seafood, skewers of chicken and beef... We even had some dessert: melon, ice cream, what must have been canned lychees (seasoned with something like cinnamon), and coconut balls that were not to our taste. We paid for that with a credit card, too. There was a big banquet area downstairs, and a whole upstairs too...gigantic place.
In fact, gigantic is the byword of this place. The hotel is gigantic, our room is gigantic compared to what we've gotten used to over the past couple of weeks, and it's in a gigantic shopping center. We explored a sporting goods store called Decathalon that looks like a Big 5 and an REI got together and had a gigantic baby. There was everything: toe shoes, hunting gear, golf clubs, athletic clothing and shoes, fishing gear, ping pong rackets -- maybe the only thing they didn't have was dive gear. Or maybe we didn't see it.
We skipped the electronics store and took a quick trip through Babies R'Us/Toys are Us. It looked much the same as at home, but some of the prices were outrageous - we saw a car seat for 369 euros!
There was also a clothing store that we trotted through, and then we went into Al Campo (which Lisa had noticed as we'd approached the hotel in the cab -- it's the same store as Auchan in France. It also turned out that there was a mall in there.
But Al Campo was amazing. Huge, wide, long aisles full of all the foods a Spaniard could ever want. Hams (complete with hooves) of all sorts, cheeses (small ones up to huge wheels), frozen foods (tapas, sushi, meats, pizzas), empanadas, a gorgeous fresh fish section with live lobsters, clams, snails, mussels, fish...we walked through the store for two hours before we decided we were tired and just couldn't do any more. We probably only got about a quarter of the way through the store, and we hardly looked at the clothing, housewares, etc. We saw most of the refrigerated and frozen foods, and the produce (which was actually the least interesting thing there) but didn't even get to the cans and boxes and bags of food. It was just too much. We took lots of pictures. The yogurt section alone was bigger than any entire dairy section in any supermarket in the states (maybe Walmart is bigger; haven't been).
We came back to the room (impeded slightly by a half-dozen Swedes with golf clubs). The other impediment to reaching our room is that you have to put your room key in a slot in the elevator, then punch the button for your floor, and then usually (but not always) key in the secret code 2030. Maybe we'll get it right the third time around, after dinner, which we are planning to eat in the hotel right at 8 pm when they open, because...
We have to get up at 3:30 am to get the 4:30 am shuttle to the airport (which we can see from here) in order to catch our 6:30 am flight to Amsterdam. Ugh.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Bonjour, Butterfly
We're writing this blog entry a long time after the events: it's Friday morning and we're in the train on our way back to Barcelona, where we'll spend (most of) the night before our 6:25 am flight on Saturday.
On Wednesday evening, we ate dinner at Monterrey Restaurant in El Port de la Selva, where we'd had lunch. To drink, we had water and a red wine (tempranillo ibericos crianza Torres). For our first course we had mussels (which were excellent, and the portion was huge) and a tomato salad with cheese, drizzled with olive oil (naturally). There were herbs on the salad too, but it was again hard to taste them -- the seasoning of nearly every dish we've had here has been very subtle. For our second course we had Entrecôte (steak) and fries, and a grilled sardines and shrimp. Neither of those dishes was quite as successful. I think we were remembering the beautiful steak that the man next to us at Can Rafa in Cadaqués had. For dessert we had flan.
The restaurant was overrun with French people who were apparently also staying at the Porto Cristo and were also doing some kind of walking tour. We were sure we'd encounter them on our walk, but we didn't -- maybe they'd done Sant Pere de Rodes the day before.
One thing about Porto Cristo is that they don't allow you to wear your hiking boots up to their rooms -- you have to take them off in a sort of laundry area and put on one-size-fits-all (read: so large that our feet wouldn't stay in them) slippers. Apprently if you go scuba diving (and there were several dive operations in town, as there were in Cadaqués), you can't take your dive gear up to the rooms either.
Breakfast at the Porto Cristo was a big mob scene -- all the French people had gotten there right at 8 am too, so there was a bit of a line, especially for the coffee machine. They had a tv on in the dining room, and we saw the leading news story: "Mor Steve Jobs." The news of Steve Jobs death was the lead story everywhere we went.
We managed to leave the hotel shortly after 8:30 and started on our journey to Palau-Sevardera via the Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes and the churches of Santa Helena and Sant Onofre. The climb up to the monastery was hot and steep - we stopped for water many times, but there were beautiful views back down. By the time we got to the monastery and paid our entry fee (4.5 euros for Lisa; free for Linda), we were absolutely soaked through our clothes and cold. We dutifully toured the monastery, much of which was built in the 10th and 11th centuries. And you think THAT's old: on the way to the monastery we passed by a dolmen (Neolithic stone structure) which dates from somewhere between the 4th and 2nd millenia B.C. While we were touring Sant Pere, we saw a woman working on restoration of some of the mural painting. There were also a lot of swifts swooping around the towers of the monastery. They have a nice little cafe-restaurant with a view up there too; we thought of having a drink there but then decided to have water and a piece of candy instead.
Our walking itinerary called for us to go up to the ruins of Castell xxx xxx, but we decided we'd had enough of long slogs straight uphill for one day, so we skipped the 20-minutes-up and 20-minutes-down. The day was hazy anyway, so it's likely that the great views wouldn't have been so spectacular anyway. (That's our story and we're sticking with it.)
Instead we continued on to Santa Helena and Sant Onofre, neither of which can be toured. We ate our lunch (an orange, the rest of our olive bread from Cadaqués, and our sausage) sitting outside of Sant Onofre. The insects -- especially the bees -- seemed to enjoy our lunch too. We saw a lot of beautiful butterflies on this walk, and some grasshopper-type insects too. The butterflies were small, some white, some yellow, some orange, and even some blue ones.
From Sant Onofre we walked straight down the hill into Palau Saverdera. We didn't follow the instructions very well, but walked right to our hotel anyway. Niu de Sol is run by a woman named Mercé and has gotten great writeups in all sorts of places, and for good reason - it's cute, there are a lot of nice sitting areas, the rooms are not tiny, there's places in the bathroom to put your toiletries, a big armoire for your clothes, lots of books and magazines to read, games, a terrace to sit on, good wifi (best we've had on the trip), great shower, beverages and snacks available on the honor system... The church tower (which we'd heard chiming at the wrong times -- about 66 minutes off -- during our walk turned out to be visible from the window of our room. We also had a nice view of what was probably the town of Llançà. Mercé also provided a very nice little book with information not just about Palau-Saverdera, but about other towns in the area that we'd been to. That's how we learned that Can Rafa (the restaurant we had fideua at in Cadaqués) is one of the best restaurants in the area.
We had a beer and a sandwich at a bar just down the street from our hotel, called Bar Nelai. It hit the spot. We sat outside; the tv inside was blaring music videos, starting with Annie Lennox.
Linda has a nap and Lisa sat in one of the lounges reading her book and perusing Spanish Vogue. Lisa realized she'd locked Linda in the room and went back up to free her. Then we went to explore the local stores and did some gift shopping. (The folder of information in the room directed us nicely to the grocery store and a little sundries store.) It was interesting to see frozen items sold in bulk (for example, string beans and fried calamari loose). There were also some pre-prepared dishes that you could take out.
Normally, Mercé serves dinner in the hotel, but tonight we she said it wasn't possible, and she arranged for dinner for us at Bar Cal Pintor down the way. We're not sure what we had: for starters we had white asparagus and cream of something soup (maybe also asparagus). We had red wine of uncertain provenance (it was red wine in a white wine bottle) and potato chips. For our second course we had a sausage with fries and some type of fish steaks with a salad. None of it was very good, but it was fun to be in a place where the locals go. One of the options for dessert was a "cornetto," which Lisa knew would be a pre-packaged ice cream cone, so we opted for that for dessert.
The TV was on and it was fun to decipher what we were seeing on it. There was a story about sushi made with raw meat (from a place in Barcelona called Fishop?), another story about special residence for gays, and another about the wedding of this 85-year-old Duchess of Alba to a man 24 years her junior. (Lisa had come upon a picture of her in Vogue earlier in the day and had wondered who this strange looking person was: she's had so much plastic surgery done that her face looks truly odd, and she has white curly hair that looks like cotton candy.
While we ate our ice cream cones, we ended up chatting with a couple from Scotland (the only other people in the place).
La duquesa
On Wednesday evening, we ate dinner at Monterrey Restaurant in El Port de la Selva, where we'd had lunch. To drink, we had water and a red wine (tempranillo ibericos crianza Torres). For our first course we had mussels (which were excellent, and the portion was huge) and a tomato salad with cheese, drizzled with olive oil (naturally). There were herbs on the salad too, but it was again hard to taste them -- the seasoning of nearly every dish we've had here has been very subtle. For our second course we had Entrecôte (steak) and fries, and a grilled sardines and shrimp. Neither of those dishes was quite as successful. I think we were remembering the beautiful steak that the man next to us at Can Rafa in Cadaqués had. For dessert we had flan.
The restaurant was overrun with French people who were apparently also staying at the Porto Cristo and were also doing some kind of walking tour. We were sure we'd encounter them on our walk, but we didn't -- maybe they'd done Sant Pere de Rodes the day before.
One thing about Porto Cristo is that they don't allow you to wear your hiking boots up to their rooms -- you have to take them off in a sort of laundry area and put on one-size-fits-all (read: so large that our feet wouldn't stay in them) slippers. Apprently if you go scuba diving (and there were several dive operations in town, as there were in Cadaqués), you can't take your dive gear up to the rooms either.
Breakfast at the Porto Cristo was a big mob scene -- all the French people had gotten there right at 8 am too, so there was a bit of a line, especially for the coffee machine. They had a tv on in the dining room, and we saw the leading news story: "Mor Steve Jobs." The news of Steve Jobs death was the lead story everywhere we went.
We managed to leave the hotel shortly after 8:30 and started on our journey to Palau-Sevardera via the Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes and the churches of Santa Helena and Sant Onofre. The climb up to the monastery was hot and steep - we stopped for water many times, but there were beautiful views back down. By the time we got to the monastery and paid our entry fee (4.5 euros for Lisa; free for Linda), we were absolutely soaked through our clothes and cold. We dutifully toured the monastery, much of which was built in the 10th and 11th centuries. And you think THAT's old: on the way to the monastery we passed by a dolmen (Neolithic stone structure) which dates from somewhere between the 4th and 2nd millenia B.C. While we were touring Sant Pere, we saw a woman working on restoration of some of the mural painting. There were also a lot of swifts swooping around the towers of the monastery. They have a nice little cafe-restaurant with a view up there too; we thought of having a drink there but then decided to have water and a piece of candy instead.
Our walking itinerary called for us to go up to the ruins of Castell xxx xxx, but we decided we'd had enough of long slogs straight uphill for one day, so we skipped the 20-minutes-up and 20-minutes-down. The day was hazy anyway, so it's likely that the great views wouldn't have been so spectacular anyway. (That's our story and we're sticking with it.)
Instead we continued on to Santa Helena and Sant Onofre, neither of which can be toured. We ate our lunch (an orange, the rest of our olive bread from Cadaqués, and our sausage) sitting outside of Sant Onofre. The insects -- especially the bees -- seemed to enjoy our lunch too. We saw a lot of beautiful butterflies on this walk, and some grasshopper-type insects too. The butterflies were small, some white, some yellow, some orange, and even some blue ones.
From Sant Onofre we walked straight down the hill into Palau Saverdera. We didn't follow the instructions very well, but walked right to our hotel anyway. Niu de Sol is run by a woman named Mercé and has gotten great writeups in all sorts of places, and for good reason - it's cute, there are a lot of nice sitting areas, the rooms are not tiny, there's places in the bathroom to put your toiletries, a big armoire for your clothes, lots of books and magazines to read, games, a terrace to sit on, good wifi (best we've had on the trip), great shower, beverages and snacks available on the honor system... The church tower (which we'd heard chiming at the wrong times -- about 66 minutes off -- during our walk turned out to be visible from the window of our room. We also had a nice view of what was probably the town of Llançà. Mercé also provided a very nice little book with information not just about Palau-Saverdera, but about other towns in the area that we'd been to. That's how we learned that Can Rafa (the restaurant we had fideua at in Cadaqués) is one of the best restaurants in the area.
We had a beer and a sandwich at a bar just down the street from our hotel, called Bar Nelai. It hit the spot. We sat outside; the tv inside was blaring music videos, starting with Annie Lennox.
Linda has a nap and Lisa sat in one of the lounges reading her book and perusing Spanish Vogue. Lisa realized she'd locked Linda in the room and went back up to free her. Then we went to explore the local stores and did some gift shopping. (The folder of information in the room directed us nicely to the grocery store and a little sundries store.) It was interesting to see frozen items sold in bulk (for example, string beans and fried calamari loose). There were also some pre-prepared dishes that you could take out.
Normally, Mercé serves dinner in the hotel, but tonight we she said it wasn't possible, and she arranged for dinner for us at Bar Cal Pintor down the way. We're not sure what we had: for starters we had white asparagus and cream of something soup (maybe also asparagus). We had red wine of uncertain provenance (it was red wine in a white wine bottle) and potato chips. For our second course we had a sausage with fries and some type of fish steaks with a salad. None of it was very good, but it was fun to be in a place where the locals go. One of the options for dessert was a "cornetto," which Lisa knew would be a pre-packaged ice cream cone, so we opted for that for dessert.
The TV was on and it was fun to decipher what we were seeing on it. There was a story about sushi made with raw meat (from a place in Barcelona called Fishop?), another story about special residence for gays, and another about the wedding of this 85-year-old Duchess of Alba to a man 24 years her junior. (Lisa had come upon a picture of her in Vogue earlier in the day and had wondered who this strange looking person was: she's had so much plastic surgery done that her face looks truly odd, and she has white curly hair that looks like cotton candy.
While we ate our ice cream cones, we ended up chatting with a couple from Scotland (the only other people in the place).
La duquesa
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Reinventing the wheel
Last night, our second and final night in Cadaqués, we ate at Can Rafa, which was very close to our hotel. We chose them because they served both escalivada (roasted vegetable salad--onion, tomato, white beans, eggplant, zucchini) and fideua (paella with noodles instead of rice). Both were good. We decided to have a red wine with it: an Empordà wine called Malajambota.
Pretty much everyone else in the restaurant was French, it seemed like. The man next to us had a very rare steak-frites that looked good. A cat came and begged for scraps. He found a patsy elsewhere.
We are learning more about how to do what we're doing. First of all, there is almost always a reduced admission price available for senior citizens at any tourist destination, museum or church we visit. They never ask for ID - in fact, they often ask if Linda is a senior.
We realize that we have not been eating or drinking enough on our walks, so today we made sure we had five liters on us and stopped to drink often. We also got some Starburst-like candies (no artificial colors; the one with the blue wrapper is pineapple) and those are good to eat on the trail.
Today's walk was quite easy in comparison to all the others we've done: Cadaqués to El Port de la Selva. It was 12.8 Km, we didn't get lost once, and we arrived at about 2 pm (having left around 9:15).
We stopped to eat a bite around 1 pm - a small loaf of olive bread from the bakery that was across the street from our Cadaqués hotel and some Ftue d'Olot (dried sausage) from the grocery store Valvi that was just around the corner from the hotel.
Linda feels she has now mastered the art of using her walking stick. Lisa feels happy without one, but she did fall (more like suddenly sitting down) during the descent into El Port de la Selva.
We have also gotten very diligent about looking for and identifying trail markers. There was really no risk of making a wrong turn today; there was a rock wall running alongside us for pretty much all of today's hike and few difficult tracks to find. However, tomorrow's hike to Palau Salvadera via Sant Pere de Rodes is slightly longer (13-14 km) and a lot of it will be uphill, with a number of places where you hav to cross a road to rejoin the trail or turn off the trail.
During our descent into town today, we passed a huge number of cact sporting very ripe prickly pears. We continued to see, as we have all along, lots of rosemary and fennel.
What made today's walk so pleasant was that the temperature seemed to be slightly lower and the tramontana was blowing much of the time. This, combined with the gentle ascent and long stretches of flat ground, made today feel like a...well, a breeze.
We are off to the hotel dining room (which is actually a couple blocks away) for dinner. We actually had lunch there: we shared a pizza margherita which was different from any we've ever had: it had virtually no sauce, just a rubbing of tomato on it, it seemed, and some cheese that seemed more like a gruyere than a mozzarella, and lots of black olives. They gave us seasoned olive oil to put on it; before the pizza, they gave us green olives that were more sweet than salty or vinegary. Linda had a Fanta Limón and Lisa had a San Miguel. We napped, bathed (Linda tried the jacuzzi tub but didn't like it), and showered (Lisa practically flooded the bathroom) before going out to the grocery store to get water. We wandered around the store for a good while, looking at the huge selection of olive oil, pondering how they make aioli ("all i oli") without egg, admiring the genius of the "ice cube bag," and buying our cheapest 1.5L bottles of water yet: 30 cents.
Pretty much everyone else in the restaurant was French, it seemed like. The man next to us had a very rare steak-frites that looked good. A cat came and begged for scraps. He found a patsy elsewhere.
We are learning more about how to do what we're doing. First of all, there is almost always a reduced admission price available for senior citizens at any tourist destination, museum or church we visit. They never ask for ID - in fact, they often ask if Linda is a senior.
We realize that we have not been eating or drinking enough on our walks, so today we made sure we had five liters on us and stopped to drink often. We also got some Starburst-like candies (no artificial colors; the one with the blue wrapper is pineapple) and those are good to eat on the trail.
Today's walk was quite easy in comparison to all the others we've done: Cadaqués to El Port de la Selva. It was 12.8 Km, we didn't get lost once, and we arrived at about 2 pm (having left around 9:15).
We stopped to eat a bite around 1 pm - a small loaf of olive bread from the bakery that was across the street from our Cadaqués hotel and some Ftue d'Olot (dried sausage) from the grocery store Valvi that was just around the corner from the hotel.
Linda feels she has now mastered the art of using her walking stick. Lisa feels happy without one, but she did fall (more like suddenly sitting down) during the descent into El Port de la Selva.
We have also gotten very diligent about looking for and identifying trail markers. There was really no risk of making a wrong turn today; there was a rock wall running alongside us for pretty much all of today's hike and few difficult tracks to find. However, tomorrow's hike to Palau Salvadera via Sant Pere de Rodes is slightly longer (13-14 km) and a lot of it will be uphill, with a number of places where you hav to cross a road to rejoin the trail or turn off the trail.
During our descent into town today, we passed a huge number of cact sporting very ripe prickly pears. We continued to see, as we have all along, lots of rosemary and fennel.
What made today's walk so pleasant was that the temperature seemed to be slightly lower and the tramontana was blowing much of the time. This, combined with the gentle ascent and long stretches of flat ground, made today feel like a...well, a breeze.
We are off to the hotel dining room (which is actually a couple blocks away) for dinner. We actually had lunch there: we shared a pizza margherita which was different from any we've ever had: it had virtually no sauce, just a rubbing of tomato on it, it seemed, and some cheese that seemed more like a gruyere than a mozzarella, and lots of black olives. They gave us seasoned olive oil to put on it; before the pizza, they gave us green olives that were more sweet than salty or vinegary. Linda had a Fanta Limón and Lisa had a San Miguel. We napped, bathed (Linda tried the jacuzzi tub but didn't like it), and showered (Lisa practically flooded the bathroom) before going out to the grocery store to get water. We wandered around the store for a good while, looking at the huge selection of olive oil, pondering how they make aioli ("all i oli") without egg, admiring the genius of the "ice cube bag," and buying our cheapest 1.5L bottles of water yet: 30 cents.
Sa Gambina
This post, confusingly enough, is about Monday night's dinner, our first of two in Cadaqués. Our materials from Catalan Adventures had recommended three restaurants: Casa Anita, which is closed on Mondays; Don Quijote, which is next door to our hotel but looks to be closed for the season; and Sa Gambina. So we went to Sa Gambina. We had snails (cargols) in a tomato sauce, and that was pretty good, as was the bottle of cava we ordered. Less good was the paella mixta -- dried out, with overcooked mussels and iodine-y shrimp, and the first thing we've had here that was overly salty. The dessert, which was the Cadaqués specialty of Taps de Cadaqués, was a play on sponge cakes (shaped like mushrooms, tall like an Italian panettone) steeped in rum, and flambéed at our table. It burned forever, but the cakes still tasted like raw rum.
Here is one of the MANY pictures we took at Dalí's house.
Here is one of the MANY pictures we took at Dalí's house.
Dalí and Doll
Today we had one thing to accomplish (well, every day, we have one thing to accomplish, but this one didn't take 9 hours): get to the Casa-Muséu Dalí by 10:30 am for our 11 am reservation. We were told, variously, that the walk would take 20, 25, 30, and 45 minutes. It took 15, so we were about 10 minutes early even though we left the hotel about 15 minutes later than we'd planned. That was after breakfast: this morning, it was a croissant, a white roll, a package of toasted bread (we're saving those for the trail tomorrow), with jam and butter and juice and coffee.
We'd been told ahead of time that we had to have reservations for the Dalí house, and once we got there, we understood why: it's a real HOUSE, and the rooms are small. No more than about 10 people can stand in the entry at the same time. When the 11 am group (including a floopy journalist who couldn't seem to keep her things collected, including her wits) went in, the guide asked us what languages we wanted: our group wanted Spanish and English. There was even another American in our group - one of the very few we've seen. (Actually, I think the only Americans we've seen since Barcelona have been here in Cadaqués.) The tour isn't guided, but there are four parts of the house and you're only allowed 10 minutes in each one, so that you're on to the third part before the next tour starts 20 minutes after you. We took lots of pictures. The views from the house were beautiful, and the décor was weird in a Dalí way: stuffed swans (who died of natural causes, they insisted), a stuffed polar bear in the entry, a stuffed eagle, many egg-shaped items, including lots of rocks; a room full of cupboards covered by Gala with pictures of herself and Dalí, a wonderful sitting room with a rotunda ceiling with great acoustics, and bench-like couches around the walls; the swimming pool surrounded by Michelin men, sporting a red lip sofa, many stuffed snakes, the light from a lighthouse, among other things; a cracked egg in the garden in which you could stand (and get your photo taken, but we didn't); a yellow sitting room; a bedroom with a mirror so you could see sunrise from the bed... the whole thing was predictably over the top. The artist's studio contains two half-finished paintings that Dalí was working on when Gala died, at which point he left the house and never came back. He had a mechanized easel so he could paint sitting down, and bring the part of the painting he was working on to his level.
After the museum, we walked back into town and saw the Blue House, a modernista dwelling that is apparently still occupied by real people - there are no tours or anything -- so we just took pictures of the outside. Then we scouted places for dinner before heading to the Museum of Cadaqués to see their current exhibit, which was of Dalí work from his early life: 1914-1928. It was interesting especially because all of the information was in Catalan so trying to figure out what we were looking at, and why, took a lot of study, but I think we got a good bit out of it. It seemed like his sister Anna Maria was a big partner in crime for him; it seems like he was an imp from the time he was born (much of his early sketches were made in geometry and physics school texts, and the later ones seemed to be on the backs of invoices). There were cubist sketches, surrealist sketches, sketches of soccer players...really fun to see the breadth and development of the work. One word we learned was "doll" -- which is a water jug that women would fill at public fountains and carry home on their heads. Dalí apparently loved this idea and did lots of pictures of women carrying these doll.
After the museum, we got some tapas and sangria at a restaurant on the street side of the beach, near the plaza. It was called Tapas S'Entina. We had baby squids with an egg (all the eggs at the Dalí house must have given us the idea) and an empadrat (sp?) which was kind of like a ceviche with white fish, white beans, tomatoes, peppers, and onions. There was also bread with tomato salsa. They always bring you and charge you for bread, just like they bring and charge for napkins in some places in Asia - kind of like a cover charge.
After lunch we went up to the church of Santa Maria, which is Baroque. We tried to puzzle out who the saints were because they weren't labeled, but Lisa has forgotten too much of her art history to get much beyond St. Sebastian and St. George. We donated 2 euros to the church -- probably because it was the only place we've been that didn't charge anything.
After the church, we went to the grocery store to provision ourselves for tomorrow's walk: another sausage, a third water, and some candy to help alleviate dry mouth. Other interesting things we saw at the store (interesting to us, anyway): gazpacho sold in jars or milk-type cartons; more of the wines we've been served (Torres, and the one we had at Casa Clara as well, for half the price, naturally); a loaf of bread shaped like a door from Casa Batllo; and shopping carts that you could carry or drag along on wheels. The people watching here is good; the people-watching at the grocery store was potentially even more interesting, because the cheapest tourists seemed among the most common clients. One guy (clearly not a local) forgot his money and had to go back for it, which jammed up the works at the checkout lines.
Tomorrow's walk promises to be much easier than yesterday's: just 12.5 Km and an easy grade (as opposed to 16.7 Km and a moderate grade).
We took naps, and Linda took a bath, and now we're getting ready for dinner. We decided we want an escalivada salad of roasted vegetables and a fideuà (like a paella but with noodles instead of rice). We found three restaurants that have what we want - we'll check them out and pick one.
We have also found a bakery (wasn't hard; it's right across the street from the hotel) where we can buy bread for tomorrow's trek.
We'd been told ahead of time that we had to have reservations for the Dalí house, and once we got there, we understood why: it's a real HOUSE, and the rooms are small. No more than about 10 people can stand in the entry at the same time. When the 11 am group (including a floopy journalist who couldn't seem to keep her things collected, including her wits) went in, the guide asked us what languages we wanted: our group wanted Spanish and English. There was even another American in our group - one of the very few we've seen. (Actually, I think the only Americans we've seen since Barcelona have been here in Cadaqués.) The tour isn't guided, but there are four parts of the house and you're only allowed 10 minutes in each one, so that you're on to the third part before the next tour starts 20 minutes after you. We took lots of pictures. The views from the house were beautiful, and the décor was weird in a Dalí way: stuffed swans (who died of natural causes, they insisted), a stuffed polar bear in the entry, a stuffed eagle, many egg-shaped items, including lots of rocks; a room full of cupboards covered by Gala with pictures of herself and Dalí, a wonderful sitting room with a rotunda ceiling with great acoustics, and bench-like couches around the walls; the swimming pool surrounded by Michelin men, sporting a red lip sofa, many stuffed snakes, the light from a lighthouse, among other things; a cracked egg in the garden in which you could stand (and get your photo taken, but we didn't); a yellow sitting room; a bedroom with a mirror so you could see sunrise from the bed... the whole thing was predictably over the top. The artist's studio contains two half-finished paintings that Dalí was working on when Gala died, at which point he left the house and never came back. He had a mechanized easel so he could paint sitting down, and bring the part of the painting he was working on to his level.
After the museum, we walked back into town and saw the Blue House, a modernista dwelling that is apparently still occupied by real people - there are no tours or anything -- so we just took pictures of the outside. Then we scouted places for dinner before heading to the Museum of Cadaqués to see their current exhibit, which was of Dalí work from his early life: 1914-1928. It was interesting especially because all of the information was in Catalan so trying to figure out what we were looking at, and why, took a lot of study, but I think we got a good bit out of it. It seemed like his sister Anna Maria was a big partner in crime for him; it seems like he was an imp from the time he was born (much of his early sketches were made in geometry and physics school texts, and the later ones seemed to be on the backs of invoices). There were cubist sketches, surrealist sketches, sketches of soccer players...really fun to see the breadth and development of the work. One word we learned was "doll" -- which is a water jug that women would fill at public fountains and carry home on their heads. Dalí apparently loved this idea and did lots of pictures of women carrying these doll.
After the museum, we got some tapas and sangria at a restaurant on the street side of the beach, near the plaza. It was called Tapas S'Entina. We had baby squids with an egg (all the eggs at the Dalí house must have given us the idea) and an empadrat (sp?) which was kind of like a ceviche with white fish, white beans, tomatoes, peppers, and onions. There was also bread with tomato salsa. They always bring you and charge you for bread, just like they bring and charge for napkins in some places in Asia - kind of like a cover charge.
After lunch we went up to the church of Santa Maria, which is Baroque. We tried to puzzle out who the saints were because they weren't labeled, but Lisa has forgotten too much of her art history to get much beyond St. Sebastian and St. George. We donated 2 euros to the church -- probably because it was the only place we've been that didn't charge anything.
After the church, we went to the grocery store to provision ourselves for tomorrow's walk: another sausage, a third water, and some candy to help alleviate dry mouth. Other interesting things we saw at the store (interesting to us, anyway): gazpacho sold in jars or milk-type cartons; more of the wines we've been served (Torres, and the one we had at Casa Clara as well, for half the price, naturally); a loaf of bread shaped like a door from Casa Batllo; and shopping carts that you could carry or drag along on wheels. The people watching here is good; the people-watching at the grocery store was potentially even more interesting, because the cheapest tourists seemed among the most common clients. One guy (clearly not a local) forgot his money and had to go back for it, which jammed up the works at the checkout lines.
Tomorrow's walk promises to be much easier than yesterday's: just 12.5 Km and an easy grade (as opposed to 16.7 Km and a moderate grade).
We took naps, and Linda took a bath, and now we're getting ready for dinner. We decided we want an escalivada salad of roasted vegetables and a fideuà (like a paella but with noodles instead of rice). We found three restaurants that have what we want - we'll check them out and pick one.
We have also found a bakery (wasn't hard; it's right across the street from the hotel) where we can buy bread for tomorrow's trek.
Monday, October 3, 2011
17
Our dinner last night at Casa Clara in Castelló d'Empúries was quite lovely. It was a set menu. They gave us an amuse-bouche of Spanish tortilla "gone upscale" with paprika and balsamic vinegar reduction. We started with a fish soup (mussels, clams, langoustines) and a warm salad with four cereals (grains) and roasted vegetables. It wasn't clear what the four grains were - one seemed to be barley. Think of Kashi cereal and you've got the idea. The vegetables included zucchini, peppers, and spring greens. Our second courses were chicken with a port wine sauce (it was supposed to be duck, but as the waiter Juan said, the duck was still flying, so it was chicken instead). It looked like a fish, the way it was presented, wiht a zucchini fan for a tail. We also had a roasted sea bream, whole fish again. Very nice. We had a bottle of wine-- local product, 3 Fincas, 11 euros.
For dessert we each had colossal chunks of manchego with walnuts and raisins.
It was a very pleasant place, sitting on the terrace of Casa Clara, so modern in the interior, looking out at the medieval buildings, and watching cars negotiating the corner right in front (used to be a baron's house).
Interesting food related art in Casa Clara (we totally missed the gallery): our favorite was chicken feet on a white background. They were somehow whimsical and threatening at the same time.
The next morning, we came down for breakfast at 8 am - the gal serving told us she had to run out to get the bread. We had pretty much the usual: bread, ham, serrano ham, chorizo, but this morning we also had plums and a garlic and olive oil rubbed on our bread with tomatoes on top. (As usual, we ignored the muesli, cereals, and yogurt.)
Steve came to "collect" us promptly at 9 and drove us to Platja Canyelles. On the way we saw giant clowns, the skydiving center (biggest in Europe), schools, houses on the beach -- sometimes it reminded us of Puerta Vallarta. Steve regaled us with stories of crazy skydiving stunts, having water dumped on him by a firefighting plane, and getting his reverge by putting the offending bombero's bike up a tree.
Today's walk was 16.7 Km long. We made it longer (let's call it 17 km) by taking a wrong turn early on, just past a viewpoint of Cap de Norfeu. We recovered by walking on a tarmac road for a while and rejoining the trail at Cala Rostella. (I'm very proud that we recovered so nicely there, and we saw great views from there that we wouldn't have seen from the coastal trail.)
The trail all day was up and down right along the coast. We kept encountering nude sunbathers along the way.
Early on we were overtaken (passed, handily) by a young woman walking alone - we saw her again later in the day. She was wearing sneakers.
We realized that we need to eat even though we're never hungry. So we ate an orange early on, around 11. By 1:15 we were ready to eat again. We had just reached Cala Pelosa. We stood around for about 5 minutes, and then realized there was a restaurant just next to us. An honest to goodness restaurant! On the beach! The cove had a lot of boats in it, and the boaters seemed to be having lunch.
We ordered two Fanta Limon - however, we were served Schweppes Limón which is an inferior product. Still, we were complaining. We ordered a gazpacho and anchovies (rosas) - we thought the combination of salt and sugar was a good idea. We perspire so much that there are white marks on our backpacks and our backs are always damp. The restaurant had a lovely restroom too. We had a little trouble putting the lunch on our Visa, since our credit cards don't have the chips that the European ones do, sometimes they don't get read - this may be why my card was rejected at one point in Barcelona. We were much refreshed by our luncheon and rest and continued on with renewed vigor.
There was a lot more up and down on the trail. There was a point around 3 pm that was straight up a hot hill. We were starting to feel this trip was not as much fun as we'd hoped for it to be. Now, I thought, I understand why Dali's watches are melting. I was melting too. But finally, after a scramble up some narrow shale trails, we reached a flatter, gravel road, and then finally came around a bend and saw Cadaques.
One of today's achievements is that we got really good at noting (gleefully) the GR-92 trail markings (red and white) and the Cami de Ronda trail markings (yellow).
As usual, we managed to get lost right as soon as we hit town. This is despite (or maybe due to) the fact that we looked at two maps of the town. We were at that point no longer actually reading our trail notes, which is generally not the right approach. We finally came upon the tourist information center and learned that our hotel was actually about 50 meters away - just across the plaza, smack in the middle of town.
Our room is on the 3rd (4th) floor and we hear a good bit of street noise when the window is open, but not when it's closed and the A/C is on.
The Hotel La Residencia is full of Dali touches and memorabilia. We are looking forward to our "day off" tomorrow. We will walk to the Casa-Museu Dali (it's supposed to take 20-45 minutes). We have reservations for 11 am and are supposed to arrive by 10:30.
Now it's time for dinner - our materials recommend Sa Gambine or Don Quijote, both of which are so close to our hotel that we'll probably only get lost twice trying to get there.
For dessert we each had colossal chunks of manchego with walnuts and raisins.
It was a very pleasant place, sitting on the terrace of Casa Clara, so modern in the interior, looking out at the medieval buildings, and watching cars negotiating the corner right in front (used to be a baron's house).
Interesting food related art in Casa Clara (we totally missed the gallery): our favorite was chicken feet on a white background. They were somehow whimsical and threatening at the same time.
The next morning, we came down for breakfast at 8 am - the gal serving told us she had to run out to get the bread. We had pretty much the usual: bread, ham, serrano ham, chorizo, but this morning we also had plums and a garlic and olive oil rubbed on our bread with tomatoes on top. (As usual, we ignored the muesli, cereals, and yogurt.)
Steve came to "collect" us promptly at 9 and drove us to Platja Canyelles. On the way we saw giant clowns, the skydiving center (biggest in Europe), schools, houses on the beach -- sometimes it reminded us of Puerta Vallarta. Steve regaled us with stories of crazy skydiving stunts, having water dumped on him by a firefighting plane, and getting his reverge by putting the offending bombero's bike up a tree.
Today's walk was 16.7 Km long. We made it longer (let's call it 17 km) by taking a wrong turn early on, just past a viewpoint of Cap de Norfeu. We recovered by walking on a tarmac road for a while and rejoining the trail at Cala Rostella. (I'm very proud that we recovered so nicely there, and we saw great views from there that we wouldn't have seen from the coastal trail.)
The trail all day was up and down right along the coast. We kept encountering nude sunbathers along the way.
Early on we were overtaken (passed, handily) by a young woman walking alone - we saw her again later in the day. She was wearing sneakers.
We realized that we need to eat even though we're never hungry. So we ate an orange early on, around 11. By 1:15 we were ready to eat again. We had just reached Cala Pelosa. We stood around for about 5 minutes, and then realized there was a restaurant just next to us. An honest to goodness restaurant! On the beach! The cove had a lot of boats in it, and the boaters seemed to be having lunch.
We ordered two Fanta Limon - however, we were served Schweppes Limón which is an inferior product. Still, we were complaining. We ordered a gazpacho and anchovies (rosas) - we thought the combination of salt and sugar was a good idea. We perspire so much that there are white marks on our backpacks and our backs are always damp. The restaurant had a lovely restroom too. We had a little trouble putting the lunch on our Visa, since our credit cards don't have the chips that the European ones do, sometimes they don't get read - this may be why my card was rejected at one point in Barcelona. We were much refreshed by our luncheon and rest and continued on with renewed vigor.
There was a lot more up and down on the trail. There was a point around 3 pm that was straight up a hot hill. We were starting to feel this trip was not as much fun as we'd hoped for it to be. Now, I thought, I understand why Dali's watches are melting. I was melting too. But finally, after a scramble up some narrow shale trails, we reached a flatter, gravel road, and then finally came around a bend and saw Cadaques.
One of today's achievements is that we got really good at noting (gleefully) the GR-92 trail markings (red and white) and the Cami de Ronda trail markings (yellow).
As usual, we managed to get lost right as soon as we hit town. This is despite (or maybe due to) the fact that we looked at two maps of the town. We were at that point no longer actually reading our trail notes, which is generally not the right approach. We finally came upon the tourist information center and learned that our hotel was actually about 50 meters away - just across the plaza, smack in the middle of town.
Our room is on the 3rd (4th) floor and we hear a good bit of street noise when the window is open, but not when it's closed and the A/C is on.
The Hotel La Residencia is full of Dali touches and memorabilia. We are looking forward to our "day off" tomorrow. We will walk to the Casa-Museu Dali (it's supposed to take 20-45 minutes). We have reservations for 11 am and are supposed to arrive by 10:30.
Now it's time for dinner - our materials recommend Sa Gambine or Don Quijote, both of which are so close to our hotel that we'll probably only get lost twice trying to get there.
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