Where’s Bertie? He’s in a municipal Aire on the edge of the village of Vilanova d’Alcolea. Exact location: 40.23196, 0.07808
Weather: Sunny and warm
Our final few days in Peñíscola involved the usual activities of us pottering about, walking through the hills, running along the seafront promenade, topped off with some local eating and drinking.
We’d finally tried out ‘Hogar de Jubilado’. That translates as ‘Retirement Home’, which doesn’t sound like the obvious place to go for coffee, but contrary to its name, it’s just a café. I’d noted it to be heaving when I’d run past last year, and it’s very much a locals’ haunt, so we thought we’d give it a go. Good call! Aside from the wares being good (the apple cake was so good I was a bit sad to only have tried it on our final visit), I managed every order without receiving a response in German or English. Indeed, the second time we visited, the server correctly told us what coffee we wanted.
We would have gone back there on Wednesday, except that turns out to be their closing day, and also the closing day of the other place we had earmarked to try (the one by the market, where we nearly went last year but it was market day and too busy). We ended up at a rather more upmarket seafront café followed immediately by a menu del dia at Miguels (where they remain convinced that we are German). Mick would tell you that I complained for most of that entire outing – justifiable in that it was jolly cool in the seafog that was cloaking the town, but unjustifiable in that it was entirely my own fault that I’d under-dressed for the weather.
Normal service had been resumed on the weather front by yesterday (sunny and warm), when we returned to the Retirement Home for a final coffee date. I ran there, the long way around, whilst Mick set out some time later and walked the short way. Ordinarily, I’m pretty good at judging how long it will take me to get somewhere, but on this occasion I hadn’t factored in an accidental race*. Arriving to find Mick not there, I wondered if I'd been stood up, but no, it was just that I'd arrived unfashionably early.
This morning, after 11 nights at Camping los Pinos, it was time to leave town. Our Chunnel back to the UK is two weeks on Sunday, so it felt like time to go and look at some other places nearby. There are a number of municipal Aires just inland in the Castellón region, with the downside that many of them offer free or very cheap electric hook up, but this one has far more spaces than hook-up points, so I was optimistic about finding a free spot. My optimism was not misplaced; after a 35 minute drive** we arrived at around noon to find only the electrified spaces were taken (it's significantly busier as I type this just as the sky is glowing orange with the last dregs of sunset).
A wander around the town this afternoon showed it to have few points of interest and ‘interest’ was a loose description of those places that featured on the Tourist Information map and the audio tour. The audio tour would have been better if: a) it had been possible to play it on double speed; and b) there had been a way to access the recordings other than via QR code, in that we only found two of the codes and thus couldn’t learn about the other two POIs we visited. Maybe the remaining short section of town wall would have been more interesting than just being a nondescript wall of unknown age, if we could have learnt something about its history … or maybe not!
Tomorrow we shall venture a little further afield, on foot, on the locally advertised Petite Randonnée route.
(*The accidental race was really quite annoying, all related to a man who wouldn’t be overtaken. He’d been moving so slowly as he passed the campsite, that as I walked along the road by way of a warm up, he wasn’t opening the gap between us. When I burst into a jog, I soon caught him up, but as I came into his sight, now on the opposite side of the road, he sped up. The two of us running at the same pace, on opposite sides of a pavementless road, was a problem for traffic, so I thought, given how slowly he’d been going, that I’d just put a bit of a spurt on and get past. So he sped up again. And repeat. Everytime I upped the pace, he upped his too. I couldn’t be doing with such ridiculousness on what was supposed to be an easy outing, so once it became clear that he wasn’t going to let me pass, I stopped dead, resisted calling him any offensive names, and then resumed once he was a good way past. He duly slowed down again.)
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