Pals to l'Ametlla de Mar

29th October

166 miles

It rained overnight, it seems ages ago since we had any, but I guess it must have been in Sommelier, which is probably not even a fortnight ago. Lying in snug in bed with the rain drumming on the roof somehow you feel about nine years old and camped out in den. This lifestyle is very good for winding back the years, I don't really feel middle aged, and the thought of Gill hitting 60 next week seems almost ludicrous.

We were heading south before 10 o'clock, and decided to take the main road towards Barcelona rather than the motorway. It snaked through an interesting landscape of low hills and wooded valleys. As I said the other day the northern part is Catalonia is an odd mixture. One moment you can be looking at hills covered in forests of umbrella pines, unmistakably Mediterranean, then you turn a corner and see a line of pale, leafless poplars with a ploughed field beyond, which looks like the Loire; it is a landscape of  transition between north and south.

 A few miles before Barcelona we took the motorway and carried on through the urban sprawl all the way past Tarragona. It was not comfortable driving. Maisy is best at around 55mph, that's a bit slower than most trucks, so constantly we were buffeted by overtaking artics.

The factory next the road looked straight out of H. G. Wells

The motorway near Barcelona. it looks benign enough, but you can't see the wall of Polish trucks bearing down upon us in the rear view mirror.

A brutalist monument to cheer up the lay-by

Storm clouds over the mountains just south of Tarragona

The area we were heading too is a small, fairly undeveloped stretch of coast just north of the Ebro delta near l'Ametlla de Mar. It's an area we are familiar with as we've rented houses near there a few years ago. Although we vowed to visit as many new places as possible this trip, sometimes it's good to revisit old haunts too. Anyway the campsite at l'Ametlla is one of the few which is open this late in the season.

When I say the coast is fairly undeveloped, that's a relative term. Really outside of protected area very little of Western Europe' s Mediterranean coastline is not built up. It's not just tourism, the coastal strip is highly populated and parts of it industrialised. Here for example, though the campsite is next to two beautiful coves and set amongst olive groves, traffic noise from the AP7 motorway is pretty well constant, and the mainline railway between Barcelona and Valencia runs about 300 metres from the site entrance. Tonight at dusk, even thought its late November a lone cicada was rattling away in the bushes. Not even the traffic noise could quite drown out its  high pitched whirring call.

The small cove beside the campsite

with ochre coloured tufa-like rocks

Put Gill next to an olive tree, and she will take its photograph....

ta-dah!

the scent of pine and aromatic herbs beside a warm blue sea - irresistible!

It was warm enough to BBQ - the Catalan sausages we bought in France were very good - more herby than spicy. We had a drop of Cotes de Roussillon to finish, and polished off the 2008 Penedes we bought en-route. Interesting to compare French and Spanish Catalan wines; the Spanish was less strong, at 12.5 degrees, smoother, but complex; maybe the fact that it was six years old softened it. Most of the French wine we have been drinking has been two or three years old, and though velvety and complex, still has an adolescent edge to it.

a particularly scrummy red

dispatched with assistance....