Ellis Family Blog

We’ve spent another couple of days in Barcelona this week. On Wednesday we took the bus again and went on another walking tour – this one run by Sandemans, who had been the sponsor of our first tour in Lisbon. Our guide was Andreas Jennngs, our first non native guide on any city tour. He’s from New Mexico in the USA (cue lots of references to Breaking Bad which seems to be their biggest claim to fame!) and prior to being a guide he was an international trainer of air traffic controllers, and is a closet England football fan. He proved this by showing meRead More →

We has a walk into Sitges on Sunday night, about 2 km from the campsite, three quarters of it along the promenade. We were informed by the Londoner who escorted us to our pitch at Camping Sitges that Sitges is the gay and lesbian capital of Spain, and he suggested that we avoid it during the day at the weekend, advice we decided to follow. However it was still pretty busy on Sunday evening, as apparently this is Mother’s Day in Spain, so everyone was treating Mum, and Granny to something! Monday morning saw us on the Barcelona bus at 10.30 from right outside theRead More →

Typically, as soon as we had dropped Ginny and Pete off at the airport the sun came out and for the first time all weekend we had beautiful blue skies. Feeling a little bit bereft and homesick we parked up and walked along the harbour to find the ferry port. The directions were minimal/nonexistent but this was mainly due to road works on the approach road and no one had bothered to signpost the detour. Anyway we satisfied ourselves that we knew where we were going later and headed back into town for breakfast, which soon cheered us up. I should mention the freshly squeezedRead More →

This edition of the Ellis Blog is kindly donated by our guest reporters, Ginny and Pete.  All the opinions expressed in this edition are theirs, and theirs alone, and no responsibility is accepted by us! As Ryanair flight FR2486 came into land at Ibiza airport there was applause before the wheels had touched the ground from all but the oldest in the plane (us) which was then accompanied by the Ryanair fanfare. Are we mad going to this party island or will we find another side to this isle? We left the airport to be greeted by two lithe and tanned folk with familiar andRead More →

The weather on Tuesday was a bit mixed when we got up, so we went for a bike ride up and down the coastline – about 25 km in total, to see what other resorts in the area had to offer.  It was easy cycling, mostly along the seafront. Frankly, the area is a collection of ghost towns; there are huge numbers of empty apartment blocks, two to three deep, which, whilst completed have hardly anyone living in them. I expect that they’ll be occupied once the season starts, but for the moment it’s eerily quiet. There is also evidence of the 2008 crash hereRead More →

We left Ruidera early on Wednesday to make the trip across the remainder of central Spain to the east coast and the Costa Blanca. We’d booked into a site at a small town called Daimus, just outside Gandia, which in turn connects to the main train line to Valencia, and is only about 20 km away from Denia, where we plan to catch the ferry to Ibiza, so as you can see, quite convoluted, but we reckoned this would be a good base. The site, Camping Aventura, was the only one we could find in the area which got moderately good reviews, although frankly thereRead More →

We left Córdoba to travel to Ruidera, in the Parque Natural de Ruidera which is a bit like the Lake District but without the rain! It’s in central Spain about 200 km east of Madrid, about half way to the east coast where we’re heading, so seemed like a sensible spot to visit over the hectic Easter period, which is huge in Spain. In fact we saw our first traffic jams on the way to Ruidera, thankfully heading in the opposite direction so we congratulated ourselves on the foresight to go somewhere quiet to see out Easter in peace. We entered the national park onRead More →

After a long, hectic day in Seville – I should mention that we got lost on our way back from the station, and ended up walking through some much less attractive areas of Córdoba – we had a quiet day catching up on cleaning, laundry and food shopping. Easter week in Spain is very different to in the UK, we were warned that nothing would be open over the weekend, not even food shops. So we stocked up our tiny fridge in preparation, especially as our next stop is in a national park in the mountains. Feeling very pleased with ourselves we headed back intoRead More →

We’d booked our train tickets to Seville online so set off for the station in plenty of time for a coffee and the security check. We hadn’t expected this but we and our bags were scanned, normal procedure here apparently, and found our seats on the spotlessly clean train which departed bang on time. We hadn’t mentioned before the beautiful drive from Seville to Córdoba, but it really is spectacular with mile after mile of olive trees, vines, long rows of cypress trees and even hedges made of prickly cactus. The Spanish seem to have very organised farming systems and everything is planted in perfectRead More →

Córdoba is a great city with loads of history, dating back to Roman times but by far and away the most spectacular building is the cathedral which is called the Mesquite which actually started out life as a mosque and was later converted into a church when the Christians took over from the Moors in the 13th century. The King later admitted that he’d made a mistake by insisting that a cathedral be build in the middle of the mosque (which was big enough to house 40,000 worshippers at its peak. It also faces the wrong way, facing south instead of south east where MeccaRead More →