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.