Woke up too early.
Got up, fed the Pup, made a cuppa and then took Pup out for her ablutions. Then a leisurely breakfast watching Sant Pol de Mar waking up. A couple of street cleaners turned up to quietly sweep the streets which really didn’t really need doing – maybe empty the bins. Despite all of the Halloween celebrations, there didn’t seem a scrap of rubbish. A few families, joggers and people exercising their dogs wandered past in the morning sunshine.
We decided last night to head down to Arenys de Mar by train and so walked the few metres to the train station. We tried to purchase tickets via the ticket machine, but it wouldn’t accept our payment, so we turned to the chap in the ticket office. Again, the card payment wouldn’t go through, so we used another card just as the train pulled in. The chap shoved a piece of paper through the window and told us to get on the train, but our timing was lousy and the train doors closed before we got onboard. Annoying, but another train was due in 20 minutes. The train parped its horn and made us all jump – again!
We lurked by the beach before we went back to the station and jumped on the southbound train – we had just one stop before Arenys as the train hugged the coastline, running alongside the beach. We jumped off the train and came up against a row of exit gates which refused our piece of paper. There was a chap sat in the ticket office and he gesticulated to go to the end gate which we did and spotting a “customer service” help button, we pressed it expecting to hear his voice. It rang a couple of times and as we looked back at the ticket office the chap was signalling “go through, go through” which we quickly did and got burped out onto the main coastal road. We had made it!
We crossed over and walked a little way until we arrived at the bottom of the main shopping thoroughfare and decided to have a stroll up there to see what we could find. It was quite pleasant with people wandering around with quite a few shops open considering it was Sunday. We stopped at a little cafe – one of many – and sat outside for coffee and a piece of cake. It was very warm with the sun high in the sky. We walked up one side and down the other, before re-joining the coastal road lined with restaurants. As lovely as it was and being very busy, it was right against passing traffic which was a bit of a downer, so we turned tail and decided to go over the road towards the harbour to check that area out – we strolled along the harbour wall with other people, watching all the different boats coming in and out of the marina with long distance views down towards Barcelona. This was lovely.
After a while we wandered back – we had spotted a beachside restaurant, Justo, on our way in to the harbour and decided to eat there. We sat under the shade of the canopy and ordered beers. The tables and chairs sat on the sand so as we sat down, our chairs sunk lower. Pup positioned herself under the table, but couldn’t get comfortable for some reason and kept digging holes, burying our feet. Finally she settled as we ordered mussels, sardines, patatas bravas and a jug of sangria. We had a really lovely relaxed lunch on the edge of the beach with lovely staff who joined in with our silly humour – finally with the afternoon wearing on, we decided to catch the train back, after filling the hole under the table that Pup had dug.
We were starting to wonder about our little train ticket as we entered the station and queried it with two staff members. They started to book us another ticket and we were trying to tell them that we had already paid. After several minutes and with the assistance of Google Translate, we finally understood what the staff were saying – we hadn’t paid for our train journey as it had been refunded. Our piece of paper was a refund receipt. It appeared that with the train at Sant Pols approaching and with issues with the card payment, the ticket chap had just ushered us to the train without really explaining what he had done (given us a refund on our second card for some reason) hoping we would sort payment out on our arrival at Arenys. Why he had done this, we didn’t know, but these two very patient and understanding staff members finally sorted out tickets for us and gave us individual proper train tickets before we finally got popped out onto the platform, after another brief tussle with the ticket gates!
With perfect timing, the train appeared and we jumped on, arriving back in Sant Pols about 15 minutes later. We spoke to an English girl who had lived in Spain since she was small and she told us that it was cold here at the moment. Cold? We had light clothing on and felt hot! It was 20 degrees for goodness sake! We told her it was around 10 degrees with rain back home which was cold, so this was like summer to us. She laughed at the thought.
We walked back to our house and took our positions on the balcony, the street below busy with people taking a Sunday afternoon stroll. Our road curves round and ends in a dead end some 250 metres away so a little while later, the same people come wandering back, but it’s lovely to see families and couples enjoying the afternoon sun, meeting in little groups and engaging in conversations and admiring our campervan, seemingly still amazed how well parked it is. It’s busy deep into the evening, with a great atmosphere and vibe.
Thinking about the young girls comments about it being cold, we noticed a lot of the locals wearing coats and jackets, all wrapped up and we were sitting outside on our balcony in summer clothing having tea. No wonder people were staring at us! Around 7:30, the young people started to gather again, but an hour later they had disappeared and all was quiet outside apart from the crickets (and the crossing). With school tomorrow, they all went home early after celebrating Halloween weekend – it all kind of made sense now with them bouncing around to the early hours.
The daughter heads back to the UK tomorrow, so an early departure for her to catch her flight home before we also leave Sant Pol and start heading north and for home. We have just under two weeks left now and it’s whizzed by. Maybe I will have to change the title of this blog to Heading North.
