Road Trip – Coast of Spain

We did an amazing road trip down the coast of Spain this summer. Starting in Barcelona, where we dropped friends off for their flight to Sweden, then down to Javea & Alicante. Four days. Amazing time!

Peniscola at night.

We started in Peniscola, about a three hour’s drive from our starting point. It was so crowded and touristy! I was really surprised. Though it was the end of June, so the height of vacation period, I suppose!

The second morning I woke up just before dawn, and decided I may as well wake Julien for sunrise. We walked through the old town streets, no one else around – that was something else!

Penis-Verd was a must-see.

Obviously, we had to stop around Peniscola for all the penis-themed signs. Of which there were many.

The roads in Spain are twisty.

It turns out I get super carsick. The roads in Spain are twisty and my tummy was not built for it. It was also in the mid-40s C, and our AC was fritzy at best.

Julien pulled over for me to vom on the side of the road often, and luckily got many photographs of it. 😐

😀 in Valencia

Valencia’s City of Arts & Sciences is incredible. It comes from the future, like an episode of TNG (or, you know, Doctor Who!). It’s super beautiful and we spent hours wandering around. Julien took a wee nap on a bench while I explored by myself a bit. Which was scary for me, not speaking Spanish, but not bad.

The food! My goodness the food. I had my first Paella in Alicante, on St Jean Baptiste day, which they also celebrate with the most amazing floats and bonfires, and food tents! The food offerings stretched on forever and we managed to partake. It was amazing, I love streetfood. We also got Sangrias the size of our noggins.

The second Paella was in Denia, who claim to be the inventors of Paella. I bet loads of places make that claim, but it was a darn fine Paella.

We spent one night in an actual castle in Tortosa! The Paradores are these hotels that are in converted historic buildings. This one was a tenth century castle, Castillo de La Zuda. We book everything in the car as we drive up to it, and because it was super last minute, we got it at like 60% off. Tortosa doesn’t seem to be a big Tourism place, so we felt like we had the whole place to ourselves. We dined on the terrace and didn’t explore the city at all. Have to go back, I guess!

Tarragona

Our last stop was Tarragona, where we hoped to see the human towers, but missed them by one day! Julien was moderately disappointed, but since we saw so much, I don’t feel too badly about it. I know we’ll be back, and I suppose we’ll time it better next time around.

This was definitely a top-trip for me. We often spend a lot of our holidays driving, but this one we had planned so many stops that it didn’t feel like a long car ride at all, even though it was about 1600 km.