We passed our time Los Canos effortlessly even though we didn't have the best weather and the whole area was kind of dead due to the low season. Plenty of time spent exploring along the coastline and watching the sun set each day. Our workaway was pretty cruisy. Her main premise was music lessons for her two daughters. Bella taught violin and piano and I was teaching guitar. Apart from that it was a bit of gardening, cleaning, babysitting and playing bastketball with the two daughters. Below is on a coastal walk.
We went for a day trip down to the end of Europe. The most southerly tip at a town called Tarifa. You've never seen so many kite-boarding shops in one town. It is one of the windiest places on the continent. We could spy Africa and Gibraltar through the cloud and rain too.
After finishing up in Los Canos, we headed up to Granada for a day's sightseeing. We spent most of our time inside the Alhambra, which is a palace and fortress complex from the Moorish rulers. An amazing complex full of gardens and palaces intricately decorated with stucco and wood carvings. See the photos. Very similar to Moorish influences we saw in East Africa. From building shapes to the carvings to the bath houses.
We then drove through endless farms of olives, then grapes, then oranges (around Valencia, of course) and then back to grapes. We headed to our next workaway host in the Penedes mountains behind Barcelona, near a small town called La Llacuna. He runs a wine tourism business. The Penedes is probably the second largest wine producing regions in Spain, and specialises in Cava, a Spanish sparkling wine. It stretches from the low-lying coastal areas up into the pine covered mountain slopes.
We worked hard here but also drunk a lot of wine too. I spent most of my time hacking a brambles with a whipper-snipper and chainsawing fallen trees. Bella spent her time cleaning the house and working on databases (however it was really only endless lists of email addresses for him to send stuff too). We tried at least two different wines each night, mostly from wineries around the Penedes but also from Portugal, France and Italy. Cavas, reds, roses and whites. On weekends we visited wineries for a full tour than typed up some Blog articles for his website (click here for mine or Bella's). It was great to have a contact to line up these visits, as it is not like in Australia where you can just turn up and try some wine. Normally it is all organised in advanced and you can pay 20 or 30 euro for the visit.
To detox we got on his bikes and rode around the place. Cycling is super popular in Spain, and the mountains are a very scenic place for a ride. With plenty of lycra out on the roads, we didn't quite fit the mould on our mountain bikes and loose fitting clothes. The problem with cycling around this area was there wasn't much flat ground, it was either up or down. Admittedly the down is great, but the up can be a bit too much at times.
We also fitted in a day trip to Barcelona. We drove to our local train station and 58 minutes later we were in the centre of Barcelona. We used to nearly have tube trips that long within London. We got another dose of Gaudi at La Pedrera and just enjoyed being in a big city again after a while in the regional and rural parts.
We spent three weeks at La Llacuna, from there we moved to the other side of the Pyrennes into France, in the middle of nowhere, near a village called Aleu. The area had a population of 1,200 people in 1890, it's now down to around 200. We've moved from little hills covered in pine trees, to views of massive mountains covered in snow. It's pretty nice. They drive through the Pryennes was great too. Lots of lakes, tunnels and mountains. And no tolls. No tolls since the way down, but i am back in France so now the test begins. We are working on repainting the insides of a 100 year old farmhouse here. And hopefully lots of hiking and visits to the boulangerie.
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