On Monday 26 August, we woke up in the
Sierra Nevada ghost town with the car fully loaded. I took the kids to get some
breakfast while Bonny Bee collected the remaining objects and tidied up. We
went in search of somewhere open, which was a lot more difficult than it
sounded. Eventually we ended up in the very restaurant we ate dinner in the
evening before. For three measly waffles, a pancake and a coffee, the bandits
charged 36 euro and 70 cents. I caused a bit of a scene about that – imagine,
you have a captive market; nothing else is open, and you’re miles from
anywhere. You could stick a “1” on the price of the bill and nobody would be
able to do a thing about it.
I thought our stop on the way should be
Almeria – I had heard a lot about it, not all of it good – but I wanted to see
for myself. It was two hours’ drive along some of the most picturesque yet
perilous roads past craggy mountains, over vast, steep river valleys, through
tunnels and around deserts. We parked in the Town Hall garage and went for a
walk. It was a revelation: such a pleasant and well-maintained city. Even the
seemingly ubiquitous police were smiling.
The central square was so bright, I needed to squint to see it properly. The children were able to run, dawdle, chase each other and push toy trucks wherever they pleased. The first thing everyone wanted was a drink. I was happy with this idea, as it would give me enough time to locate a place to have lunch. The first place we came across was called La Taberna Del Loco, and it was one of those places which played covers of cool 80s and 90s rock songs but with that ultra annoying calypso beat. And it was really loud. We wouldn’t be eating here.
Just around the corner was a shady pedestrian road and it had two or three restaurants on it, one of which had very good reviews. After we got out of there, we landed at that place, and it was excellent – it worked as such: you get a drink and you get a bite-sized tapa. If you want extra, it’s 2 euro. We voraciously ate our way through the menu and it was glorious, although only the adults went for the pinchitos. These aren’t the same ones as found in other parts of Spain: these are skewers of pork or chicken covered in spices introduced by the Moors and cooked over charcoal grills.
For me, pinchitos are part of my childhood:
high in the Andalucian mountains, the elders of my family had a house. In the
town was a bar-restaurant called La Reja. We went there about four nights in
every seven. It was a very special place nestled between the houses, and was an
open terrace under long grape vines that provided shade in the day and beauty
at night. And they made pinchitos that engraved a massive space in my early
gastronomic memory. Back here in Andalucia, I was reminded of La Reja and those
pinchitos.
I’m more at home in Spain than I ever would have imagined a year ago.
Now was time to get dessert. Walking a
little further, we happened upon the central market – it was just closing but
we had enough time to buy some cherry tomatoes, garlic, and other fruit and
vegetables. I asked the stallholder where we should go for a dessert and her
colleague sent us to an ice cream place about 10 minutes down the road.
After a delicious but cantankerous visit to the ice cream place, we headed in a foul mood back to the car where we sped off to our final stop on our tour, Torrevieja. It was still two and a half hours from Almeria, but I was hoping the children would maybe stop fighting long enough to have a sleep. And that they did. For a while.
A couple of hours later, having left
Andalucia far behind and hurtled through the autonomous region of Murcia, the
hallowed signpost appeared: “COMUNITAT VALENCIANA”. I was so happy to be back
in my adopted home region, that I completely let go of reality and was pulled
over by the Guardia Civil for speeding. It was the irony of all ironies: here
we are, having almost accomplished a complete tour of the Iberian Peninsula,
and I am greeted in my home region by a fifty-euro speeding fine… the officer
was kind enough, very professional, and told me it wasn’t a great deal over the
limit, but rules are rules and I took it as a positive omen.
Just fifteen kilometres further on, the
town of Torrevieja appeared, as did some horrendous traffic jams, but we soon
made it to our next address, and found a parking space just ten paces from the
door. We were informed by the property owner about the procedure to enter the
place: “When you get to the front door of the premises, please press buttons on
the Intercom to allow someone in the building to let you in.” Well… I had never
had such an adventurous arrival at a place… we pressed a number of buttons but
nobody opened. In the end, some student type with an electric scooter was
heading out and we were able to gain a foot in the door.
The next instructions said: “at the top
left of the door is a small black box with a code. Type this number in and you
will find the keys inside. It was fairly dark in the corridor, so it took a
little time, but we managed to enter the apartment. Well I say apartment – more
like a capsule with a couple of windows. But it was just a week and this
odyssey will be over.
I’ll be totally frank – since the robbery
in Setúbal, I haven’t really enjoyed the trip as
much. Except maybe for Seville, but that was just three days and I could have
gladly spent all summer there.
That evening, we went for a walk and to find some food. I didn’t feel like cooking. Torrevieja is quite a cosmopolitan place and we stumbled on a North African restaurant. The call of a tajine was too loud for us… I had a lamb tajine with olives and sultanas, and Bonny Bee opted for a chicken tajine with some fine spices. Both were exquisite, although I got he feeling the cook went light on the spices for fear of upsetting our European tase buds. We usually tell the person taking the order to cook it as it should be, but we forgot this time. The children had some tacos with Moroccan-style filling, and they miraculously ate it. We all slept pretty quickly, even though it was hot and stuffy.
On Tuesday 27 August, we woke up in a sweaty heap – more so than Seville, and I think it’s the humidity here on the Valencian coast. I bought us some food and cooked a lunch of tagliatelle ragu, then we went down to the building’s main attraction: the pool. Tiny but adequate for our purposes, the children loved making their own fun in there. In the early evening, we took a walk to the main road by the beach. The road was long and caused Dainoris to obviously get agitated, but the promise of ice cream at the end took the edge off his routinely sulky and resentful temper. So he just kept saying “I don’t wanna go for a walk” in a whiny and persistent manner.
We got there, and suddenly, as if by way of a miracle, the smiles returned and the moaning ceased. For a while. One of the things I had been meaning to do was to get Livia a cuddly toy. Milda has a rabbit and a chick, the latter being loaned out to Dainoris at bedtimes. But Livia lost her own rabbit back in Germany before we left, and all other replacements were just not as good. Plus it’s her seventh birthday on 29 August.
To a chorus of “we’re tired” by Dainoris
and Milda, we passed a toy and game shop on the way home and my plan was to
sneak Livia in there for a few minutes, buy something, and meet the others a
little later on at the playground. Bonny Bee was content with taking all three
in the shop, but I had grave misgivings. These misgivings would prove to be
right – Livia took thirty seconds to identify the doll she wanted: a lovely
tousle-haired stuffed figurine. We could have been out of that shop in no time
and nobody would have been any the wiser, but now Livia had something, the
other two started demanding a present too. Milda even threw her chick and the
rabbit on the floor of the shop and declared that she didn’t like them any
more. In fact, she went utterly berserk. And Dainoris gave a stellar
performance as The Boy Who Never Got Anything.
We tried to placate them with some smaller
stuff, but they wanted to go for things larger than Livia had. And that was
when we decided to teach them a life lesson: if you can’t be happy for your
sister when her birthday is on the horizon, you don’t deserve a reward. Imagine
the absolute meltdown that confronted us as we left the shop with just one
thing… Bonny Bee was holding on to Milda, but Milda resembled more a swarm of
incensed wasps with a hand. And Dainoris had chucked himself in a mournful pile
of snot and tears on the pavement. They were both wailing like a pair of car
alarms on low battery.
If there’s one thing parenting has taught
me, it’s that we aren’t there to be popular. We aren’t there to keep the peace
by giving in to every demand. We are there to provide a moral compass and set
an example, and not to be everyone’s best mate. There are limits to our
patience, but there are no limits to our determination not to blink first every
time we are presented with a new demand.
We made our way to the playground in the
square outside our apartment block, very slowly while this meltdown was going
on. Dainoris’s crying had gone from total indignation to feeling the need to
cry out of principle. Milda had been saying she was tired of walking, but I
knew that as soon as we reached the park, all this would be over. Just before
we turned the corner into the playground, I said to Milda “If you’re tired,
you’ll need to have a rest!” And she agreed. Reverse psychology often works
when one element is hidden from the subject – and to her credit, she didn’t
suddenly say “I’m better now”, and run off to play. She really did sit with us
for a good five minutes.
We went home for something to eat before bed, but two of them didn’t last very long…
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