Pals

28th October.

Camping Mas Patoxas is one of a handful of sites still open on the Costa Brava. Open is a relative term, apart from the sanitary block and reception, every thing else has a Morecambe in November end of season feel. This may be a good thing as in August the place must be a nightmare. It's as charmless as you get, serried ranks of mobiles and camping chalets set out on straight gravel terraces with shade provided by identically pollard stumpy plane trees. 

identical chalets

tarmac pitches

Our impression of the place was not helped by it being now the pollarding  season. A gang of men was slowly butchering the avenue of trees at the entrance. In order to relieve the boredom and drown out the cacophony of screaming chain saws the site P.A. drummed out thudding Euro dance music of the most moronic kind.

tree butchery

chain saws and thumping trance!

In order to escape it we pedalled into the nearby village of Pals, which is old, winding, and beautifully restored.

Quaint medieval streets

thoughtfully placed old pots

narrow alleys with a vista towards the countryside

Bougainvillea draped facades

We returned to the van for lunch, then got straight back onto our bikes afterwards and headed back to the village, for as soon we had finished  lunch so did the tree butchers and the Euro pop wall of noise  switched back on. To our amazement Pals was still as old winding and beautiful as it had been two hours previously, but this time it was  animated by a couple of coach tours. The first was some kind of Spanish Saga trip. The old dears piled off the coach and immediately formed an orderly queue outside the public toilets. Given that they were of the single cubicle, tardis variety, I expect the tail end is just getting close to the door about now. The second trip was a school party of fourteen year olds. You could tell their age because the girls were tall, buxom and trying to look eighteen, and the boys were small and weedy and desperately trying to look more than ten. There was a large grey bus from Sweden in the car park. Oddly enough there were no Swedes in the village. We concluded that amazed at the cheapness of alcohol, the entire party was probably comatose on the floor of a local hostelry.

It's not been all bad, the showers are warm, and large enough for notices on the to caution campers not to shower together as couples. This is a relief as the cubicles have three quarter doors, bar-room style, which is just a little too public for this northern male. Oh yes, and Gill managed to buy a Spanish SIM card for the Moto, so we're still connected to the outside world, or at least the strange simulcra of it represented in cyberspace.

We going to move on tomorrow, south beyond Taragonna and find a campsite with direct beach access. That's the plan anyway.