Two weeks behind with the blog…it’s almost like we’re losing
enthusiasm for it or something crazy like that…
Well we didn’t get involved in too many extra-curricular
activities w/c 22nd October, as Nick was busy chipping away at the
rock face for most of the time and the weather wasn’t brilliant either. There are a couple of notable things to
mention though.
On Wednesday Nick decided to climb another mountain. Don’t worry, this time he was dropped off and
picked up again by Svenja and Thorsten and had a working mobile phone with
him. He arrived back later with no major
incidents to report so you’ll be pleased to know that this blog entry is not
going to consist of another of Nick’s blow by blow accounts of
mountaineering. Instead, it will mainly
be our adventures in the beautiful and traditional Spanish town of…..Benidorm!
On Saturday we took the bus from Callosa to Benidorm to visit
the circus I had read about on the internet.
(A non-animal circus though, because we are so not down with that). Benidorm is pretty much exactly as the TV
show portrays it - really not that great.
We arrived a couple of hours early so after a walk through the town we
stopped in one of the hundreds of English pubs for a game of pool.
I won…..just saying. At
6pm we were sat in our seats with a tub of multi-coloured popcorn, ready for
the show to begin.
The show was pretty good – highlights included some aerial
acrobatics and a laser show. Low points
were the obviously the clowns. No-one
likes clowns.
The real entertainment though started when we left the
circus and started to make our way back to the bus station. As some of our die-hard blog fans who never
miss an edition will already know, the main theme of our trip has been not the European
culture, or even the Mediterranean food or climate. It’s been Getting Lost Over and Over and Over
Again. I’m sure you’ll all be getting pretty
bored of these stories by now so I’ll try and keep this one as brief as
possible.
The route we took from the bus station to the circus didn’t
seem like the most direct one we could have chosen, so when we left after the
show I asked Nick whether there mightn’t be a better way to walk the return leg
of the journey. Nick consulted the oh-so-
reliable GPS on his phone and found that there was indeed a “more direct”
route. Instead of the 2.4 miles we had
walked to the circus, this return trip was apparently only 1.9 miles. Great!
Or not…
Long story short is the GPS lied. Again.
Consequently we ended up walking out of Benidorm, past vast amounts of
farms and orange groves, and then climbed up the embankment to start walking
along the side off the motorway, ending up 10 minutes walk away from the bus
station with only 3 minutes to spare.
Bearing in mind this was the last bus back this was not good news so we
sprinted the last section of motorway and off the exit ramp to arrive at the
bus station just in time. However Nick
(who was obviously quite a few metres in front of me by the end of this race),
shouted something mostly unintelligible to me over his shoulder as he reached
the entrance of the bus station. This was
apparently something along the lines of, “Go and wait down there (pointing
round the side of the station to where the buses pull out from), and I’ll go this
way and find out which is our bus then hold it for you.” 
Now, what he actually said was an absolute maximum of five
syllables and there was no pointing involved so, whose fault was it that I
remained exactly where I was at the entrance to the bus station, after only
hearing the words, “Wait” and “There” meaning the bus left without us? Not mine.
Two important lessons were surely learnt here:
Lesson One:
After more times of trusting the crappy GPS on Nick’s phone
and consequently getting lost than either of us care to remember – we will
NEVER again rely on it.
Lesson Two:
Even in races against time such as this, enunciation is
always key.
So, off to the tram station we went in the hope that there
would still be one running to Altea where we could get a taxi from back to the
finca for around 30 euros. Not being able
to locate any sort of path leading to the station though, meant that we simply
had to walk along the tram lines until we arrived there, dashing down the bank
when one approached from behind at very little warning.
All’s well that ends well though, as when we got to Altea we
had the best tapas of the trip in a little restaurant on the sea front before heading
back to the finca in a taxi. Result.
