8th November 2016. Figueres, Spain.

Darren started the day doing some work.  While he was chatting on the phone he suddenly started pointing manically out of the window.  Above the roofs of the shops a murmeration of birds were putting on a great show swooping and swirling, how on earth do they all manage to change direction like that without having a massive pile up. I can only assume that they must have spent months choreographing those moves!

I wasn’t sure whether I was going to be able to cycle into Figueres this morning considering I felt exhausted and shakey just getting washed and dressed in the morning, I was like a human version of Bambi, without the cuteness  but it was definitely preferable to walking so Darren got the bikes out.

I’m glad we were in a large empty part of the car park because anyone watching would have thought I’d never riden a bike before as I slalomed across the concrete.  Luckily by the time we reached the road I’d regained my balance and even luckier the road into town was all downhill!  I groaned when I remembered I’d have to cycle back up there later.

We had a short look around the town which was scattered with some really wacky buildings and artwork designed by Dali.  As we pushed the bikes up a hill we walked past some buildings which had been painted in bright colours, they looked vibrant against the cloudless sky.

It wasn’t an easy task but we eventually found a sunny square, in the other streets the buildings were so tall and the sun was so low that the streets were mainly in shadow.  The square was overlooked by a church with beautiful ornate gates, the area looked so pretty we decided to stop there and have a coffee.

 

While we were sitting admiring the gates and architecture we heard a couple talking.  Ooh! English accents!  As we had no idea what was in Figueres Darren went over to ask the couple if there were many things to visit here.  They told us their SAT NAV had sent them on a voyage of discovery the previous day and they’d driven through most of the streets in the town centre so they were able to positively say everything we needed to see was in the area we were currently in.  Superb!

We had a nice chat and then explored for a little while longer before we started our cycle back to the van.  We were very surprised to find ourselves back at the van six minutes later having only had one short push up a hill and a couple of sections of freewheeling downhill, how did that happen? However it happened it was a wonderful surprise. I’d like to come back here again on another trip to see the Dali museum.

As we drove out of Figueres another flock of birds flew across the road in front of us (I assume they’re starlings, it was hard to see at the speed they/we were going!).

Through out our European trip I’ve been searching for birds, no wonder they were few and far between it seems that they’re all in Spain on their Jollydays.

Our final destination today was going to be in Palamos.

However we had one stop to make on the way there.  Halfway to Palamos we popped into a caravan dealer who also services motorhomes.  Our friends Kathryn and Alex had recommended them.

The man was very helpful, it seems he’d never seen a generator run on gas before and was so amazed he got his workmates over to have a look at it.  It took him a little while to discover why it wasn’t working but we were very pleased when he got it running, we’d had visions of carrying an unusable generator around with us.

We drove on to Palamos to an aire which was another of Kathryn’s recommendations.

I was a little concerned that we might not get a pitch but Darren assured me that it wouldn’t be that busy at this time of year, it seems everyone must be thinking the same because there were only four pitches left…… perhaps we shouldn’t leave it quite so late in future (we’ve been saying that for months!)