Day 8 – Sunday 6th July –Tossa De Mar

I’m sitting outside in the restaurant in Tossa De Mar having breakfast. No oddities in the restaurant this morning – no matching / counter matching families, no tubby chicks wanting two meals. (just to elaborate on the tubbies, they were a bunch of middle aged women on a hen’s weekend - I didn’t’ get what number trot up the aisle it was. They were all universally unhappy with their husbands and having to send instructive texts to them about how to cope in their absence).

The weather is much cooler today (Tuesday), with some high cloud. I’m expecting it will burn off, as the weather map that I saw on TV before we came down to breakfast showed the entirety of Spain covered in sun. There also appears to be much fewer people around today, as a lot of people were just here for the weekend and have now headed back to Girona or Barcelona, or wherever.

Much to our amazement we discovered that Breakfast is included in the price of our hotel. We were surprised, because this no longer appears to be the norm and it’s usually an optional extra – might be for people booking over the internet, I don’t know. We’re also surprised because this is the cheapest hotel we are staying in on the whole trip. Another good thing, is the hotel has free wifi internet, so that brings the average down a bit. An offset is the 24 Euros per day price for public parking in Tossa – a 15 minute walk away – ouch.

After a leisurely breakfast, we went for a long walk around the narrow windy streets (that’s windy as in twisty, not windy as in Wellington. Although Wellington is a popular brand of beach umbrella here, so maybe it gets windy also – but I digress). The day is a real scorcher – mid 30’s again, so it was good to get some shelter from the sun from the high buildings that line both sides of the street. We walked up the castle to get a good view of the Tossa beach and all the thousands of beach umbrellas on it.

For lunch we had ham and Melon, marinated salmon, and a Brandatta of cod. After lunch, we went for a drive along the cliff top road that runs along the Costa Brava from Lloret de Mar (a very large tourist resort) to Palamos, via Tossa De Mar, Sant Feliu de Guixois and Platja d’Aro. It was a fun drive with lots of twists and turns and several very nice view points, which we stopped at. After Palamos, the road turned inland to Palafrugell and then back out to the coast to the small town of Llafranc. Llafranc was the other town that we had planned to stay at, before we settled for Tossa. Llafranc is a very pretty town, smaller than Tossa De Mar and a bit more expensive too.

After a walk around Llafranc, we got back on the road to Tossa at about 7:30 on a Sunday night. Hmmmm. Not our best work. Tossa and all the small towns on the Costa Brava are the Spanish equivalent of the Kapiti Coast and the roads and motorways on a Sunday night are the Spanish equivalent of the Plimmerton round about. It had been our intention to travel back on the motorway, but we soon hit a major tailback there, so we cut in land onto the back roads, but didn’t fare much better there after. We finally got back to Tossa at about 9:30. Because the Spanish eat so late, that was no problem, so we settled down for a meal of Paella with noodles and Sangria. There was no late night entertainment on tonight and no outdoor soccer, so after taking some night shots of the castle, we retired to bed