11th December 2016. L’Albir, Spain.

We cycled along the sea road into L’Albir today, the lady who owns the aire told us there was a market.  We explored quite a lot of L’Albir before we finally found it.  It was like a mini version of Blackbushe market, which unfortunately has now been changed into a housing estate) and we had a fine old time wandering round it.

Naturally we had to stop for coffee and tostada con tomate (I could feel the tomato reserves dropping in my body!)  We stopped to buy some sweet potatoes on a veg stall and were somehow persuaded to buy some huge tomatoes (we’ve already got THREE punnets in the van!) but the stallholder told us they were exceptionally tasty with olive oil and salt sprinkled on them so we decided to give them a go.

We left the market and tried to find our way back to the sea.  Darren had been saying earlier he hadn’t marked the aire on his phone this time because we only had to follow the sea road back, it didn’t occur to either of us that he might need to put a marker point on the sea road!   Finding the sea should have been easy peasy so how come after we’d cycled round for ages we ended up back at the market (could it have been because when we reached the junction I believed my husband when he said we needed to turn right.  I’d been incredulous that he had remembered and genuinely very thankful that I wasn’t on my own because I’d been about to turn left, telling him I’d got no sense of direction, I’m beginning to rethink that idea.)

We decided it was possibly safer to go back up the hill the way we’d first come to the market and retrace our steps to the sea.  It only took 10 minutes to get to the beach after that.

It was essential that we calmed our nerves with a cup of coffee and…… wrong, not tostada con tomate this time….. ice cream.  We FINALLY found some tasty ice cream in Spain, which deserves a repeat visit.  We sat in the café looking out over the beach and people watching which wasn’t quite the plan, we’d chained the bikes up further down the beach and come in search of takeaway coffee, then spied the ice cream, we were going to sit on the beach with it but the assistant misunderstood Darren’s ‘takeaway’ mime!  As I’m the one who spent three years studying at the London College of Dance and Drama maybe I would have had more luck if I’d  been the one who had done the mime……..or maybe not!

We’d had a weird experience as we were padlocking the bikes up, two children came up to us, the boy was on a sit on segway and the girl was on an electric scooter.  The boy politely said “Excuse me sir do you know where Monkey Rent is?”  Darren said “Sorry we don’t” and I said apologetically “we don’t even know where we are!”  Darren noticed them sitting with their parents in a café later without their ‘vehicles’ so we assume they found Monkey Rent!

When we’d finished our ice cream we walked to the beach and I had a paddle, which was lovely.

Refreshed from the paddle we cycled back to the van where we sat outside to recover from all cycling then as the sun started to dip we went back to the sea to watch the sun setting over the sea.

It has been another lovely day.  Thanks for suggesting this trip Darren, it’s been wonderful so far.