Spain #1 - Castelldefels
Go ahead and find the images from Barcelona, here.
The problem (for us) with having a car is getting the parking space with the accommodation for free and on premises… or rather parking at all. Usually the larger city centres are out of the question out of the box (probably the pricing isn’t nice either the closer to the centre you get). So we have no other choice but to look for accommodations close to the city. And Reet’s doing a really good job at finding those. Yes, I complain, from time to time, but they have been fine.
Now, we booked a place in Castelldefels. Airbnb listed free parking on premises under its amenities. When I asked about the parking 2 days before arrival, though, they sent me an image of where I could park. It was on a street 5-minute-walk from the apartment and it wasn’t private parking, just parking on the street, meaning: if you’re lucky you can park 5 min away, if not, well, then good luck. I was royally pissed. Wrote them that I’d like to cancel. They of course replied that it’s only 1-2 minutes away and even closer once we hit October (our week crossed over to October), well… we were past the deadline of free cancellation if we do it and as Estonians, we like to just suck it up and still went there (didn’t care to respond to their stupid response).
BTW have I told you that almost no-one speaks English who rent Airbnb in the south and we are using the Google Translate app almost all the time? Whenever they tell us something, I keep the phone under their noses and let the phone translate. A really really useful thing to have. Even in McDonald’s drive-through, I use by writing stuff down on the phone and they just read it in translated form. Just Today (long-long after this location) we went to a café where the translate app was used. The other app is Google Lens, which is opened multiple times a day for us to translate the menus, signs, etc. My point is: you can easily manage without knowing English, Spanish, French or whatever, there are tools for that now. If those apps weren’t available, though… We’d have a much-much more difficult time here (it’s not easy with these apps either, not everyone understands that they should speak into the phone and sometimes they need to say it twice etc - don’t travel, if that’s not okay for you… or just use your hands or whatever).
In any case. We drove to Castelldefels, to my big surprise we found a place that was almost as close as possible (5-minute-walk), and got the keys and there we were.
The place was great, let me explain why:
As soon as we got all the stuff from the car to the apartment (I went back and forth between the car ~3 times and ~6 times to bring all the stuff up from the bottom floor to the third floor) we went to the beach (3 minutes away by foot) and the season wasn’t over. Beach restaurants were open, the beach was full of people, we would even see the lifeguards.
The apartment had a swinging chair and Netflix for Saskia. That’s some luxurious s*it.
But most importantly:
a grocery store 1 minute away
a bakery 1 minute away
ice cream shop 0,1 minutes away
a shop where they sell only fruits 1 minute away
and of course, numerous restaurants that start from our building and go on to different directions
Turns out that we were in the centre of something (not Castelldefels itself, because that centre was ~30 minutes away, but a centre of something still)
By Monday evening it wasn’t THAT great any more. Let me explain why:
Turns out that the last day of “summer” was on the Sunday, so… no lifeguards any more or a beach filled with people or the beach restaurants. Everything closed down.
While the living room had air conditioning, the bedrooms did not, so that wasn’t in any way awesome (and one couldn’t keep the windows open because… mosquitos)
Because of the season now being over, the playground for Emmi that came with one restaurant, was removed, so we had to walk for 20 minutes before Emmi could slide down something.
But… but… the other restaurants were still open and the beach was still open and 50% of the weather was good enough to go to the beach. Most importantly, though, there were shisha places like everywhere (where I’d spend 3 nights at). By far the best location until Today for us. Still I was glad to leave in the end. Why?
Well. The parking. I hate the thought of going to a shopping mall (because you can’t buy Emmi’s diapers from the grocery store) and not knowing if you can park 5 minutes away or 15 minutes away from home. Thus every time we wanted to move by car, I was worried (and I do worry a lot about the small stuff – not enough big problems I guess).
So, I had to go to the big store, alone early in the morning (because our women don’t move from the house before ~12 (11 minimum) and the parking places would get full during the day very quickly) to buy stuff that Reet had put to the shopping list. Do you know how annoying it is to buy stuff you’re never going to eat yourself and don’t even know how it looks? VERY.
When we went hiking and came back, we needed to park on a street that was farther away and felt like a parking place for people who lived at that house, not for random people. I felt like a bad person.
Also, we couldn’t take down the rooftop box that we have on top of our car, because we didn’t have a place nearby to put it to, and thus couldn’t go to Barcelona. Why? I imagined that there are only parking garages, not large open areas and our car is about 2.3m in height when the box is on top. Not that I would have cared about more shopping and old buildings.
What did we do other than going to the beach and walking for kilometres at a time to find different playgrounds for Emmi and Smoking shisha?
Every night, and I mean every night at 10 or 11 we’d go shopping for ice cream with Saskia. It became our ritual, a routine even by the end.
And we went hiking. Twice.
Reet found a hiking area that featured a Monastery. I told her that I had found a similar hiking area. Mine was bigger, so we went there!
Sant Jeroni Summit Loop
To get to that trail, we needed to first drive for an hour to the Monastery, because too poor to get the accommodation closer.
Now, because we’re weak in addition to being poor, we also took a “Train” up the mountain for ~50 euros. And then, after 2 hours or so of walking. We decided that the hike was nothing special. Sorry for wasting your time here. But the monastery itself was… well… big, so if you like big things, it’s okay.
The lesser Monastery
The second monastery, the tiny building that Reet found, that featured a hike nearby as well. That hike was even less remarkable than the previous Monastery one, on paper.
The road to that was only half an hour on a scenic route. Again, on paper.
So when driving to that hike and seeing a sign to the hilltop “La Morella” (it really was a hill, because only 594m high) next to the road, I Said to Reet: “I saw a hike to that hill earlier in alltrails app, but it was too long for a family hike, maybe we can get to the peak from here - maps.me says that we should get there – in addition to the sign :D of course.” And instead of the unremarkable hike. We took a hour long out & back hike to an unremarkable peak. Okay, we have seen worse, it’s just… it was too short to even call it a hike (and at only 594m, it wasn’t impressive enough to just impress us with the views). As we had so much time left, but not enough to do the other unremarkable hike, we visited the monastery instead.
Of course, like with the other monastery, there was a restaurant and the possibility to get a tour or something. So we just left (because too poor) and spent the rest of our time next to the scenic road waiting for the sunset, which was promising. Instead of waiting until the sunset happened, though, we decided that it’s not worth driving back in the dark though. So, again, nothing even from that. Sorry for wasting your time again (spoiler, though: the awesomest sky ever never happened on that evening, we believe it’s because of the clouds blocking the sun on the horizon – so it would have been a total waste of time if we had stayed).
The roads to and back both monasteries were awesome, though, so if you like driving, both are worth the drive with plenty of easy views.
Another thing… Strangers
While Emmi was playing with a child on a playground far from home, I spent a minute of my life speaking with that child’s mother, who happened to be an Estonian (the first and last Estonian for the first 2 months we have been on vacation). Of course, during the conversation, I was trying to figure out how I can finish the conversation as early as possible, because I’m a proper Estonian. And as the conversation lasted for a minute, I think that we both succeeded in our missions.
Oh, while we’re on the subject of speaking with mothers. Emmi’s like a supermodel here. Everyone’s like “oh my god how cute” or something similar. Thus, there are a lot of awkward conversations with mothers. Some give up after catching her name, some give up after understanding the age, some try a bit longer, like “are we living here or visiting”, but no-one has succeeded in a conversation for more than a minute, because they just get the answers, but no “what about you?” in return.
And that’s what our trip has been like for the first two months (including the following places in Spain). No actual conversations with anyone other than our family members. For me this has been fine, seems that it’s fine for Reet as well, but Saskia’s for sure missing her friends and hurting the most and Emmi just doesn’t know any better yet (that she could have a friend maybe when living at home. Though I don’t know how she’d be getting playdates with strangers’ kids, because I wouldn’t want to speak with strangers in Estonia either).
Okay.
To summarize Castelldefels. It really was one of the best places to stay. Everything we needed or didn’t need was close. The apartment was fine for a home that isn’t our home. The hikes were Okay and did we miss going to Barcelona? Not at all. Did I mind that one Estonian woman? Of course not, though short, the conversation was more than enough. Would definitely go back during high season when:
someone would pay for the trip and
it would be the only vacation option and
I won’t lose any of my vacation days for that
