Friday 20 September

We woke up to rain so took our time before making a decision as to what we were going to do with the day. After a while it seemed to stop so we decided to cycle to a nearby town, Ulldecona. I put the cycling route into Google maps and off we went, about 8 miles each way. The first few miles were great, it remained dry and the road was extremely quiet which meant that Lottie could run alongside us. But we were aware that we were heading inland, uphill, towards the mountain with a big black cloud around it. As we cycled around the mountain the rain started, I had a light showerproof coat but Paul had nothing so was soon very wet. We won’t even mention Lottie who had had a shower last night and had started out very white and smelling lovely 🙁

We soon got around the mountain, the rain steadied to a constant drip, and we headed towards Ulldecona. At this point I still thought we would make it. We could see a HUGE fast road ahead of us. Paul commented that he hoped we weren’t going on that road. No, I said, confidently, we’re going underneath it. So, we got to the part of the path that went underneath the road and we were faced with a massive puddle/lake across the whole width of the path. We were about a mile and a half from the town, very wet and I told Paul that I was happy to turn around and cycle back. No, he said, I’ll try it first. So off he went and cycled through the centre of the puddle/lake. He reached the other end and said ‘you’ll be fine, it’s about a foot deep so you will get your feet wet’ 😯 After taking a deep breath I set off, with Lottie in her box, and Paul shouting instructions such as : peddle! / make sure you’re in turbo / put your brakes on – what???

Anyway, Lottie and I made it across, just, with only 1 slight wobble, and very wet feet.

We turned a corner and were faced with more water 😳 but I couldn’t go back through the puddle/lake we’d just come through, so with Paul going first to test how deep the puddles were, I followed. One after the other, they seemed to go on and on, water everywhere. Eventually we came to a road and I told Paul that even though we were only about half a mile from the town the last thing I felt like doing was going into any shops or sitting at a cafe – I was soaked to the skin (as was Paul) and filthy. So I found a road back to our original road and we set off in the pouring rain. By the time we got back around to the coast side of the mountain the rain had stopped and the sun came out. At the first supermarket we saw I went in and bought some doughnuts and ate a whole one in about 2 seconds. I was very pleased to get back to the campsite. I don’t think they had had any rain at all.🙁 17 miles and not many that were pleasurable really. Paul said to think of it as an adventure.

We had some late lunch and collapsed in a heap.

At some point the English chap who

knows it all popped by and we ended up arranging for he and his wife to come by for a drink later as he wanted Paul to explain something about tv satellites to him. They duly came round, and whilst Paul and Alistair talked tv satellites, I had to sit and smile at his wife whilst she talked non-stop about her and her husband, all the places they’ve been, the big house they had, etc etc etc

I shall be glad to get into bed tonight. More rain forecast for tomorrow. I might have to do some cleaning.

I took a picture of the entrance to the campsite, you can see how far away the beach is (in the middle of the photo )