Peniscola

We woke up late after a miserable night of high winds and rain. It appears that we are not as “travel hard” as we were before our month of rest, as the long drives the previous two days have taken their toll on us. It also takes longer to get ready and we tire easily on short excursions. The drive to Peniscola was short, only about 15 km where we parked at the base of the 13th century castle. We walked up the narrow streets to the castles main entrance. The area within the castle walls is filled with tourist shops and restaurants. Ever since Marbella, Julie has been on the look out for bandana, still no luck. The castle was nice enough and had an interesting exhibit on the knight’s templar, though we understood very little of it because of the whole language issue. The view from the top tower was nice. You could see both beaches on either side of the castle, the hills and mountains, the coast itself and the ocean. It was a bit too windy though, the wind even managed to blow off my sunglasses. So I took the photos and met up with Julie (she had gone back down before me) as she wanted nothing to do with the wind and being on top of a tower (Spain doesn’t exactly have strict public safety rules).
It was off to Tarragona and hopefully Barcelona as well, but along the way Julie spotted a Carefour department store and suggested to stop and have a look. I managed to buy a warm jacket for 10 euros and Julie bought a new pair of badly needed jeans for 15 euros. We also managed to do some grocery shopping as well in the store so it was no surprise that we didn’t get to see anymore sights for the day. We found a parking spot just outside Tarragona’s town centre that night. It was early and we had run out of butane while reheating our left over stew so we headed into town to have a quick look around and to find the McDonalds for dinner. What we saw of the walled town was pretty promising, so we decided to stick around and see what we could the following day. Just a reminder, we are on a tight schedule as we intended to be in Venice for Carnival, but we have so many other sights to see before then, so falling behind a day wasn’t an easy decision