Travel Day

Our route (click on all pics to enlarge)

After dithering about which route we should take, we decided to take the fast route and just pay the toll for the AP highway, since we were late in departing Palafrugell.  The AP toll highways are three lanes each way and are just fantastic highways with terrific signage.

You have to stop at the automated toll booths and take a ticket, when the AP ends, you go through another booth and can pay automatically with a credit card.  The traffic was heaviest near Barcelona and the toll segment ends even though it is still an AP highway.  Then the pay section begins again and it lasted all the way to our exit to Tortosa.

The further south we travelled, the less traffic there is, and it goes down to two lanes in each direction.  It took approximately three hours to drive from Palafrugell to Tortosa, the highway speed limit is generally 120 km/hr.

When we got to Tortosa, we stopped at a supermarket to get some groceries.  Our accommodation for the next week is very unique.  It is essentially a hotel that provides breakfast but there is a full kitchen to utilize along with a dining room and a couple of sitting areas.  The hotel is a restored historic building with a defensive tower and a modern addition.  It is all stone and stucco walls with traditional terra cotta tile flooring.

There are no other guests here right now and the owners do not stay here but they stop in to see how things are going.  The owner is a teacher and an incredibly nice person.  They provide quite a few treats for guests in the kitchen but we bring all of our own food, although we will have the odd espresso from their supply.

We don’t take a lot of photos of humans while we travel, but once in a while we will take a pic of people going about things.  We tend to save these photos, which we refer to as human interest pics.  The criteria for a human interest pic is pretty straightforward, it should have people in the pics or something related to people and not our usual pics of buildings or landscapes.  So, here are our human interest pics from Costa Brava....

The Catalan flag is often displayed

We are not much for beer, but these tiny 250ml bottles were perfect when we didn't want to crack a bottle of cava due to a travel day, thus, the empty cava glasses

We encountered this on the wall of a fishing hut on one of the beaches

Hikers up one of the peaks in the Garrotxa, we should have hiked it, as they were higher than us with better views, and that hike was half the elevation gain of ours

The only sailboat we saw on our coastal walks, although we saw a few freighters

Farmer spraying his cereal crop