Well, yes, we were meant to be going to Barcelona today. We had train tickets booked. We got to the station and parked in plenty of time. Avoided getting run over by the policeman, who was so pleased not to have scraped his car against the wall he was parked beside that he didn’t look to see if anyone was coming… and made it into the ticket hall. On checking the departure boards we couldn’t see our train, only 1 at 11.15 (ours was meant to be leaving at 10am, and we were booked on the 18.30 coming back). So we went and asked someone (not a policeman..)
Train cancelled – but you can use your ticket for the 11.15…. A little despondent we sat sulking until I suddenly had the thought that perhaps I should check that our returning train was still running – it wasn’t. We could catch the 16.15 instead. Mmmm – so £120 to go and spend about 4 hours actually in Barcelona! What to do?? (Btw – in case you haven’t realised the reason for the cancellations was a strike….)
We had the bright idea of asking for a refund – which was easily obtained (and in fact paid for almost our whole day in Barcelona – tomorrow J )
We thought that as we were in Perpignan we should have a little look. We walked down the road opposite the station (typical run-down station type area), to find an interesting looking building – however we chose not to go and look closer as it was being picketed by strikers..
We went a bit further along, but seeing nothing of interest we headed back to the station along the river. I think we picked the wrong road – there was a nice avenue of trees, but each tree had its own mountain of doggy do surrounded it’s base – not at all pleasant.
Please note – this may be a totally unfair review of Perpignan as we weren’t really in the mood to explore further. This was due not just to the disappointment of missing Barcelona, but also that my heal hadn’t completely healed (since the trek up to Gavarnie last Friday) and I was still struggling to walk in anything but flip-flops… Perpignan might be a perfectly lovely place if you go to the right area – which we clearly didn’t!
Before returning to the campsite Calv forced me once again to visit Lidl – and then blamed me and told me never to make him go in there again!!
After lunch we took the car (the weather still not being particularly sunny) to have a quick look at the beach, which turned out to be rather pleasant – not really warm enough to sit on it though! We took a long circuitous route back to the site – after pootling down the coast a bit. Okay, okay that’s code for ‘we got lost again’!
Dinner of salmon, and then our habitual later night than we would ever have at home! (After watching a bit more Gavin & Stacey).
In between dinner and bed though we went in search of fuel for the little car. We ended up back in Perpignan (please don’t ask…) wondering if we were going to find a petrol station before actually running out of fuel – our SatNav wasn’t helping. All’s well that ends well though and we found somewhere in the nick of time – of course there were loads of petrol stations before the 1 we found, and plenty much, much closer to the site – only we couldn’t find them, and sometimes you can see them but not work out how to get to them….
Photos tomorrow – Barcelona J
turnrightoutofportsmouth 