Spain reloaded 4: A-Costa-ed
Five hours on a bus each way, combined with another jam-packed day of hotel inspections. It’s no wonder most of my recollection of this day is fuzzy, I was running on fumes. We all were. When the people leading the trip start handing out Coke, cookies and chips to keep us functioning like normal humans, you know something’s up. Not that I’m ever going to argue with free Coke and chips (Spanish Lays come in this great Tomato and Onion flavor, I highly recommend it. Skip the ham and cheese ones, the flavor is creepily accurate, but there was something about that taste coming from a potato chip that weirded me out. According to the seafoodies amongst us, the Prawn Cocktail is also really good, but I’ll have to take their word on it).
From our hotel in Salou in the Costa Dourada, we drove back past Barcelona (I know, the logic of moving to a farther south hotel only to tour hotels in the north is lost on me, too) and up to the Costa Brava. The scenery is pastoral and fairly uneventful, though we did get a great kodak moment of the jagged Monserrat mountain from the freeway. This drive went really fast for me, but then again, I was plugged into my MP3 player (practically everyone else was asleep, it was early) and grooving out to some Rihanna and Robbie Williams.
The first two hotels, the Hotel Blaumar and it’s sister Hotel Blaucel are connected by an underground tunnel. This tunnel also has skylights that look up into the adult’s pool, and clearly most swimmers forgot that they could be seen from below. With perfect timing, we look up to see a female body bob past, wrapped tightly around a happy male body. The look on the sales rep’s face as he tried to just keep talking as if nothing was going on was great. Naturally, we all squealed like a bunch of teenagers.
Then the underwhelming Hotel Tropic Park, the very overwhelming Hotel Florida Park (the pool is gorgeous and even has the ever so rare patch of private grass to lounge on), another buffet lunch, the Hotel Neptuno, Apartmentes Neptuno, the Best Western Las Palmeres (guess what? It looks like a Best Western) and finally the Hotel Kaktus Playa (my favorite hotel name, just seeing Kaktus spelled like that makes me snicker).
More Coke and chips, two and a half more mp3-filled hours on the bus and we and our numb bums were back at our hotel in time to hit the buffet. Hmm, it seems I was hungry on this day, as the main things I remember involve food. Ooh, I miss gelato… Focus, Holly. Anyhow, after dinner a couple of us wandered down to the beach to burn off some buffet calories and officially dip our toes in the Med and hit up all the tacky souvenir stalls. And these are a new standard of tacky. I got a great keychain of a guy wearing a barrel for my best friend, and when you lift the barrel his spring-loaded bright pink penis pops out. It’s awesome! We gotta get us some of this crap at home.
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- A drive-by pic of Monserrat
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- Shop at Splaff!
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- The perfect view from the Hotel Blaumar
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- Hey, look! Another cathedral, this one in the Costa Brava
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- Salou beach at night, it looks like Honolulu!
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- Salou as seen from the beach. There’s my fave souvenir stand…
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