Pit-stop on the Costa Brava.
From Franconia via Paris we headed to Barcelona to visit Marc, an old mate from Katherine, who's been back in his native Catalonia for a few years now.
On the train to Spain, Niamh patiently puts up with yet another photo!
In southern France heading into Spain...
Well, we thought we were visiting him in Barcelona and staying at his place, but the night before he told us he wasn't sure if there was a place to stay and when we got there he clarified that he lived about halfway back towards France, near Palamos on the Costa Brava.
Narrow Barcelona streets.
So after a quick catch-up with Marc, who had family business the next day, we had a bit of a wander around the city alone, spent the night on the floor of his currently vacant unfurnished apartment, wandered around again the next day, then met Marc in the evening to travel back up to his place on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona. After lots of travel and fitting in too much with too little time, it was, I must admit, a vexing and tiring outcome - by this stage I was well and truly travel weary!
Once we finally got to Marc's place though, we had peace and quiet and comfort in his small flat that he shares with his lovely partner.
I took advantage of this by spending a good part of the day semi-comatose, doing very little. In the evening we went for a walk to a small beach a few kms away and cooked a light dinner on an open fire next to the water and the next day spent the day sea-kayaking - a first for me! - north from his place and back.
A paddling break on the Costa Brava.
We paddled along an area that had been reserved from development, so it was quite picturesque from the water, mostly (in the few kilometres we paddled) free of buildings, in some areas with tiny former fishing villages of a few houses, but it was within a broader context of holiday development. The area where Marc lives is almost entirely in existence for holiday-makers, so at this time of year it is almost empty - streets and streets of flats empty, with just a few lights at night indicating someone is home. It is a very strange, almost unsettling, feeling, walking the deserted streets, seeing what would have been presumably open country swathed in concrete and bitumen. Then, just around the corner, less than a kilometre away, you walk through fishing villages, also eerie, abandoned by the people who must have spend generations there, now inhabited also by holiday-makers. A weird feeling.
The new(ish) face of the Spanish coast.
The old face, fishing villages abandoned and now inhabited by weekend visitors and holiday-makers.
I also say my first ever cork tree and learnt that it isn't, as I'd been lead to believe, the whole tree that is harvested, but the bark, taken off in whole every ten years or so.
A cork tree!
After our few days in Catalonia we headed back to Ireland, striking, at last, the right balance of speed and stopping - terribly put, but no other way occurs to me! After a 1 1/2 hour bus trip from Palamos to Girona, we got on a French Madrid-Paris TGV to Perpignan, just inside the French border and spent a lovely few hours having dinner in the open air before boarding a sleeper to Paris just after 9pm. In Paris we had time for a light brekkie, then got the train to Bayeux where, after a lovely long lunch, we visited the Bayeux tapestry museum, well worth a visit, then got another train for the final hour to Cherbourg, where we did a bit of food shopping, had some dinner, then boarded the ferry to Ireland.
Boarding the night train from Perpignan to Paris.
A rainy farewell to Cherbourg and continental Europe.
A French lunch on board.