We began this day with Yet Another Almy Adventure. I stepped outside on the patio to take some pictures, and closed the sliding glass door behind me. When I tried to get back in, I couldn't - the door latched from the inside. I banged on the door, and tried to get Terry to open it. Unfortunately, she couldn't figure out how to open the latch. I was trapped.
I climbed up to the rooftop patio, and managed to attract the attention of a maintenance man. In my fractured Spanish, I managed to convey my plight, and he came and rescued me. I later figured out that, if he hadn't been around, I probably could have climbed over the patio wall and dropped down to the pool deck, and escaped that way.
The guidebook mentioned boat cruises from Calpe up the coast to the town of Denia. That sounded good, so we drove down to the port to catch a cruise - only to find out that the cruises don't operate in the winter. Going on vacation in the off season is definitely a mixed blessing - fewer crowds, but you miss out on some things. But I did get this closeup picture of the Ifach:
We dithered for a while, and then went for breakfast while we dithered some more. I had churros con chocolate (that's where I took the pictures on the intro page), and was amused to see a TV commercial for Mr. Clean - except in Spain, he's called Don Limpio.
Eventually, we decided that if we couldn't take a boat, we'd take a train. So we drove to the Calpe train station:
Looking South
Looking North
"The City of Calpe to the railroad on its 75th anniversary"
Waiting for a train
...and took a train ride to Altea, a small town down the coast. Along the way, I took this picture of an interesting looking building:
I never did figure out what a building with Russian style onion domes was doing in Eastern Spain. A Russian Orthodox church, maybe? I guess I'll never know. By the way, the odd blue tinge in that picture comes from my taking the picture through the train window.
In Altea, we walked across the street from the train station, and down a block to the beach:
...and had lunch at a restuarant with the unlikely name of "Pippermint:"
...where we were entertained by a guitar player:
Unfortunately, lunch wasn't very good. Most every restaurant we went to in Spain was great, but there were a couple that weren't so great, and this was one of them. We had a seafood paella, in which the rice was so yellow that I suspected they were using something other than saffron to color it - a real paella uses only saffron. Also, the shrimp in this paella were whole shrimp - shells, heads, legs and feelers. Sorry, but that's too much work!
It was while having lunch at Pippermint that I had my "epiphany" about that big body of water out there being the Mediterranean, and not an ocean, that I referred to on the intro page. So of course, I had to take a picture. The young woman sitting on the beach and looking out to sea made a nice touch:
While eating lunch, I was musing on something I had been noticing. As I said earlier, I've travelled to Mexico several times. While some Mexicans are light skinned, most of them are darker skinned. So when you're in Mexico, it's generally easy to tell the locals from the tourists - the lighter the skin, the more likely the person is a tourist.
But that doesn't work in Spain. Nearly everyone is light skinned, so it's not as easy to spot the tourists. And this was brought home to me rather dramatically when we went back to the station to catch the train back to Calpe. I approached some people on the platform, and asked, in my fractured Spanish, if we were on the right platform. And they answered me in perfect English - they were Brits!
Once we were on the train, we made the spontaneous decision to stay on the train past Calpe, and ride to the end of the line and back. The end of the line was Denia, our original destination. We didn't see anything of Denia, though - we just stayed on the train and came right back.
Some things I saw on the ride:
Terraced fields are something I've read about, but I don't think I've ever actually seen before. It's a method of farming on hilly ground, by carving the hillsides into a series of flat terraces. Later in the week, I took some pictures:
After we got back to Calpe, we drove around for a little bit, went back to our room and spent some time researching Valencia and planning the next day's schedule, went out for dinner, and came back and went to bed.
Here's a map of the day's wanderings:
