Day 7 of 7. Today was a travel day really but we had a late flight so we got to spend half a day in Palma de Mallorca. We left our luggage at the station and just walked around, aiming our steps vaguely towards the old town and the cathedral.
Mostly we were hot. Then we found a museum, I’m not even really sure what its name was but it had things (mostly art) from Mallorca throughout the ages. The particulars weren’t important, the main thing was that the museum was blessedly cool.
Ingrid is really looking forward to beginning seventh grade. She is really looking forward to the new school year at the her new school, for all kinds of reasons. She’s looking forward to a fresh start in a new class and making new friends. She will be going to a class with a maths and science profile, which is great because she loves these subjects and has been complaining for years that maths class is just too easy and she doesn’t get any more challenging tasks even though the teachers promise in each parent-teacher conference that she will. Her previous class was kind of noisy and relatively disorderly, and she has high hopes that this class will be better because it’ll be made up of students who actually want to be there and study.
And the new school itself seems great. There is a giant library, and all the classrooms (especially the science rooms) look inspiring, and the kids get their own computers and lockers. LOCKERS! Did I mentions lockers? The rest of the school could probably look like a junkyard and Ingrid would still look forward to being there because LOCKERS. She is so happy to get her own little corner where she can have her stuff and not have to carry it around or worry about it getting lost.
She is also looking forward to Comic Con in September. She will be browsing and buying pop culture stuff for an entire weekend and has saved up money for it long in advance.
The list of Ingrid’s favourites below is a mix of questions I asked and categories she added. It hadn’t even occurred to me that one would have a favourite YouTuber for example.
(I haven’t done any monthly posts in a long time and probably won’t be picking that habit up again.)
Day 6 of 7. Valldemossa to viewpoints and back, 9.3 km.
The only walk option in the trip notes for today was a long and demanding one with a lot of ascent. We didn’t feel up to it so we improvised a walk of our own. From Valldemossa we followed the road down towards the beach, but then turned off the road onto a narrow, steep, twisty path that took us to the top of the cliffs. Up there we followed a nice wide path that took us to several viewpoints. And when we had walked far enough, we walked back the same way.
The clifftop path was mostly flat and straight, and often exposed towards the sea, so it was easy walking. The 9 km was less than we have walked on past trips, but more than we have done in the past few days in the heat. Today it was no effort. I purposely didn’t say anything about the distance to the kids, and they were surprised to hear how much they had walked without it really feeling like that much.
Our hotel here in Valldemossa has no pool. Understandable, given the area: it’s all small, narrow streets packed together on a rocky hill. After we’d had our daily ice cream, we just spent the rest of the afternoon lounging on the shaded terrace and our air conditioned rooms, doing nothing much. We are really looking forward to going back home to more normal weather.
Day 5 of 7. Sóller to Deia, 9 km, 380 m of ascent. Local bus from Deia to Valldemossa.
Those 9 km seemed like a lot to begin with, especially after yesterday’s performance. Would the kids be able to do it at all, in this heat?
Indeed the initial ascent wasn’t much fun. But as soon as we got a bit higher up into the hills, into areas that were open towards the sea, we got a cooling breeze and everyone perked up. The heat is most insufferable when the air doesn’t move and sweat doesn’t evaporate. (This was the first time ever in my life, outside of saunas, when I literally had trickles of sweat running down my body.) Just having some movement in the air, even though that air was no cooler, made a huge difference. After the frying pan feeling of the valley around Sóller, this was quite refreshing. Indeed I thought that if all the days could have felt like this, we could have done a lot more walking this week, even with this heat wave.
In one or two magical spots the wind must have blown through some cave or deep ravine or otherwise been cooled by the rocks somehow. We were hit by a blast of cold air that felt like opening the refrigerator. What a moment of luxury! Ten steps further ahead it was back to normal.
Today Eric and Adrian were entertaining each other with games, while Ingrid put on her headphones. Their game was to go through the alphabet and come up with a [something] for each letter. First it was English first names, A to Z. Then animals, then some other thing.
I liked this “transfer hike” better than the previous one, not just because of the sea breeze. The paths were smoother, the surroundings greener and more varied, and the views more interesting. We passed mansions, high walls and ravines, and of course olive trees and pines.
Valldemossa, our destination for today, is a beautiful place with a lot of history. Unfortunately, as with most such places, it’s been strongly tourist-adapted. On the plus side, the town is incredibly tidy and clean and very pretty to look at. On the minus side, it’s full of tourist cafés and souvenir shops. Being here as a tourist myself, I have no right to complain, even though I kind of want to, anyway.
The oldest parts of Valldemossa are very steep and narrow. Some buildings seem to be built around a large rock outcropping, with the rock literally forming a part of the foundation.
Day 4 of 7, sea views from Port de Sóller, 3 km / 6 km.
Today is Saturday, which is market day in Sóller, so this morning we strolled around the stalls in the town centre and browsed everything from straw hats to strawberries.
The plan was to take a taxi to the harbour and then start walking from there. But the taxis were all busy or something and we gave up after waiting for half an hour, and took the expensive tram again. I saw locals taking the tram for a short hop only; they must have a special tariff or they’d all be ruined by their tram commute.
We had a number of route options for today, but the heat is debilitating. Today was the hottest day yet (the forecast was 37°C) and our enthusiasm for walking in this weather is beginning to run out, so we chose a very short walk. From the harbour we just walked to the lighthouse and back. As we got higher up and closer to the open sea, we got a bit of sea breeze and felt almost invigorated… and then we had to walk back down into the frying pan again.
This was enough for Ingrid, so she and Eric headed back to the hotel. Adrian and I still had some energy left so we rounded the harbour to the other side of the bay, to see the views from there. We were hoping to be able to get far enough to look back to the lighthouse we climbed to. The very tip of the headland was a closed-off military area so we couldn’t get that far, but we got some nice views out towards the sea. This was right out in the open, in the burning sun with no shade, so we admired the view for no more than a minute and then fled down into whatever shade we could find.
Note to self: dinner at Ca’n Pintxo, a modern tapas place just like the one we liked in Fornalutx. El huevo del chef was some kind of egg concoction topped with smoked honey foam: I can’t even really say what it was I ate, but it was delicious.
Day 2 of 7. Fornalutx to Sóller. 8 km, 350 m of ascent. Which would be a piece of cake for all of us if it wasn’t for the heat.
We set off along the pretty, flower-adorned, cobbled streets of Fornalutx. But our route started ascending before we had even left the town, and that ascent then continued for three and a half kilometres with nearly no breaks. We were, frankly, suffering most of that time.
Finally we reached the viewpoint at Mirador de ses Barques and were rewarded by views all the way down to Port de Sóller. At the café we got some rest, and ice cream and refreshing drinks.
Here the relentless ascent ended and we now mostly walked downhill. The weather was no cooler, but not having to push uphill all the time made a huge difference.
The kids complained about the heat a bit but I got the impression that it didn’t bother them as much as me and Eric, it was more just something to complain about. Their real problem was boredom. Now they started playing “20 questions” with animals to pass the time. Soon they were fairly skipping along, walking ahead of us to the next point in our route description (“in 150 metres, pass an old gateway” or “when the path crosses a trail, keep going straight ahead”) and waiting for us to catch up.
The paths and trails were sometimes cobbled but often quite stony and uneven. I had to keep my eyes down in front of my feet much of the time, so I couldn’t look around as much as I would have liked. But that was perhaps not a huge loss – the surroundings today were less varied than yesterday. Mostly lots of stone walls and gnarly olive trees and dusty, brown ground.
Thoughts of air conditioned hotel rooms and a dip in the hotel pool kept us going, and we were justly rewarded upon our arrival.
Day 1 of 7. Circular walk around Fornalutx via Binibassi and Biniaraix, 6 km.
The heat wave is here and the heat is incredible. Stepping outside the hotel feels like stepping into an oven. But we’re here to walk and there isn’t much else to do in this little village, and spending all day in the hotel is not our idea of fun. So we walked, taking it slow and drinking lots of water.
Walking soon became an exercise in seeking shade. Whenever the path zig-zagged, we crossed it to walk on the shadier side. If we wanted to stop a sip of water, the first step was to find a tree that was large and dense enough to provide proper shade. Standing still for even a minute in the burning heat was too much.
Luckily there were quite a lot of trees, and the path was often bordered by high stone walls, which gave even better shade. This old washhouse was very pleasantly cool.
The orange and lemon trees were so full of fruit they looked like they were from a picture book. We found some lemons that had fallen into the street and ate one; it was delicious. It was strange to eat a warm lemon though: we do eat quite a lot of the fruits at home at room temperature, but I only use lemons for cooking and keep them in the fridge so in my head lemons are always cold.
It was interesting to see the trees so well adapted to the dry climate: they all manage to keep their leaves and fruit, while the ground is dry dust and the grasses have all withered and died.
We’re staying (for two nights) at a lovely little hotel, Petit Hotel Fornalutx. It has a terrace and a garden, and even more importantly, a swimming pool.
We spent most of the afternoon in and around the pool. Ingrid and Adrian swam and splashed; Eric and I sat in the shade and cooled our feet in the pool.
Note to self: the restaurant Molón is very nice. Tapas and small dishes to be shared, but of a modern kind, which meant many more meat-free and vegetarian options than in all the traditional Mallorcan restaurants we passed.
On our way to Mallorca for a week of hiking.
This year we let someone else do the planning for us and bought a ready-made package. Our seven nights in Mallorca are spread over three different towns, so some days we walk from one place to another, and other days we stay put and just walk around.
Unfortunately our trip coincides with what threatens to be the worst heat wave in Europe in living memory, so it remains to be seen how much actual walking we will be able to do. The current forecast is for temperatures over 35°C.
Ingrid and I went to Kyrksjön (Church lake) for a late night swim.
The older I get, the less fond I am of of bathing or swimming in cold water. I rarely go swimming in the Mälaren nowadays. Kyrksjön is small and sheltered and gets really warm, so today even I went for a long swim.
For Ingrid, the best part of swimming is the jumping and diving.
It’s Friday, which means movie night, which means dinner that can be eaten in the sofa. Ingrid is cooking us a beetroot risotto.
| « Older posts | Newer posts » |
