05/2003 - Boggling! in Sitges
28th December 2003
!Hola Amigos!
Some of you have picked up on the throw away reference to 'the Boggle challenge' that appeared in a couple of earlier bulletins. An explanation was requested for the uninitiated.
Boggle is a marvellous little game consisting of 16 multi-lettered dice in a small plastic grid. The idea is to shake the container that the grid sits in, mix up the dice, and then allow them to fall into a random pattern. You then have to make as many words as you can from the touching letters (up, down, slanty, loop-de-loop, as long as they're touching) within four minutes of the kitchen timer. As we have advanced to 'Boggle Extreme' we changed the rules and decided that only words with four letters and above can be used.
Jeni won the first championship 10 - 7 and the second 4 -1, and has been awarded the Boggle Challenge Trophy (a plastic mineral water bottle base covered in foil and inscribed with her name and the scores). Mind you, with words like 'minge' and 'arse' you can understand why Dave gets slaughtered most nights! Amongst her better efforts were 'vilify', 'mawkish' and 'rhesus' (cor, what an education does for you eh?!). We regret the lack of an Oxford English Dictionary on our bookshelves, as sometimes it turns into Boggle-meets-Call-My-Bluff when one of us is trying to convince the other of the authenticity of the word we've found. Dave was doing great with the three letter words 'til someone changed the rules!
Actually, to keep you on the edge of your seats, Dave is currently out in front in the third championship.
So that's Boggle folks. Can't recommend it highly enough for those odd moments whilst you're waiting for the medication to kick in!
And the other question from some recipients of our mailings has been "who on earth is 'Pikey Pete'?" (knowing this wouldn't be the usual turn of adjective for us!). Well, for those of you with a delicate disposition I would suggest that you skip this bit and read on from the more savoury parts of the bulletin - if you're still reading, you have been warned!
Pikey Pete lives in a motor home full time with his long suffering companion Gippo Gill (these are the names that they have adopted and now refuse to answer to anything else, so please don't blame us for the nomenclature!). They are currently hiding in the UK somewhere (or YUK as Pete calls it) while they have repairs done to the roof following an explosion caused by his illegal still. Normally they would be travelling in Southern Europe at this time of year cutting a swathe through the bodegas. (Proprieters are complaining that profits are markedly down this year!) Some of you may have been approached by him with an offer to participate in a pyramid sales scam to do with selling cloths pegs to your friends and relatives, but most of you will have seen that his pegs are cheap plastic, unlike our own, individually hand whittled, wooden variety.
Pete and Gill were responsible for helping us to loose our motor home virginity, although Pete insists that he wore his rubber gloves and that at no time did both his feet leave the ground at the same time.
Further candid exposes of other friends and/or family are imminent unless sufficient quantities of Euros are deposited into our bank account, so be warned!
Just before we leave the Mysteries of Motorhome Life, our lovely friend David 'Nanook-on-Wheels' articulated some questions which have probably been burning in other minds as well. 'What's it like to live in an RV? Is it comfortable? Can you still cook a 7-course meal with cheeseboard? What's the sex like? Just as good, only more compact?'. Suffice to say that we have commissioned a bumper sticker 'Motorhomers do it with the stabilisers down' (cook a 7-course meal, that is). And yes, it is very cosy. We may consider ourselves 'Viajeros Intrepidos' but we do like our creature comforts!
So, where were we? Ah yes, paddling our tootsies in the Med on Christmas day after having enjoyed a picnic on the beach. We cycled into town on Christmas eve to have a look round and sat for an hour outside a cafe in the sun, opposite the beach, having cafe con leche and donuts (one of us had two!). Dave managed to slip off and - naughty naughty - did a small festive retail flurry. So later on in the evening after Jeni had been to the facilities block to do the washing up (you can see now how every moment holds excitement!), she was told to 'sit down, close your eyes'. And lo and behold Dave had bedecked the inside of the Lorry with sparkling fairy lights! They're particularly fine ones too as they do dancing sequences in colours not just boring old flashing on and off. We think they should become a permanent fixture - fairy lights for life, not just for Christmas?
Padre Navidad (?!) visited in the night (despite having been told he could drop us from his list this year) and brought us a deliciously useful expandy filey-file, a set of draughts, a chess-set, a DVD of 'Chicken Run' in Spanish (!), and dominos to add to the sad-evening-activity cache. (Curiously the Made In China dominos assure us that they are 'All urea pieces with metal spin' - does this mean we should wear Matron's latex gloves when handling?!?) Dave discovered that Pere Noel had also filled one of his purple stripey socks with traditional seasonal clementines, an apple, a Tunnocks bar and a large bar of Coco-Crispies chocolate! (He'd got the measure of Dave, don't you think?!)
As mentioned, on Christmas day itself we spent several hours down on the beach having a picnic watching the rest of the world stroll by (and chatting with some of the populace). It was wonderfully warm. Jeni paddled as you can see, but wasn't able to tempt Dave to strip off and plunge in, it was a bit on the chilloir side! We cycled some more (thigh muscles a'throbbin' ) then returned to the van, sat outside in the sun for a bit, then as dusk fell around 5.30 came in to make cosy. Jeni relaxed while Big H (first named 'Big Husband' by his sister-in-law, the lovely Jane, and the name just stuck!) cooked his pork chops and her tortilla for the evening meal. What a great Christmas day.
Our stay at Rosas was characterised firstly by our 'bad case of wind' (to quote from one lovely response to the description of our gale-buffeted nights); secondly by that terrible habit we developed of mid-afternoon picnic lunches by the beach and thirdly by the miles and miles we cycled. Dave reckoned that Jeni looked like Isadora Duncan with her lilac scarf floating on the breeze as she peddled. Jeni prosaically retorted (her words folks! D) that Ms Duncan would not have been seen on a red and yellow trike with her Marks & Spencers trousers tucked into her socks! (The trusty tricycle has, however, now been christened Isadora after over two years answering to a variety of names that never quite stuck!)
The site at Rosas was lovely - very quiet, there was never more than half a dozen camping cars there and it was huge. The two families who jointly own it were delightful, an assessment based not only on the fact that they presented us with a bottle of bubbly, a card and a box of chox - all beautifully gift wrapped - on Christmas eve before they went off. (They had warned us that reception would be closed on Christmas day, though all our facilities were available, and they gave us 'a keya ofa the doora' so we could come and go as we wished with the main gates closed.)
All in all, great place, great place. Rosas is probably jumping in the spring and summer, but lovely and quiet at this time of year. A real treasure of a 'seaside off season' place - very pretty, flat for cycling (we're not that fit yet folks!), lively little town-centre, fascinating 'ciutadella' (the original walled town/fortress with Greek, Roman, Medieval and later remains), all in a fabulous bit of coast. Rosas is set in an almost circular rocky cove surrounded by natural parkland. The hills further back had had a dusting of snow but nearer to the town was that familiar scrubby Spanish hillside that each evening turned the most gorgeous pinky-orange as the sun set. Oh and for good measure, there's lots of Salvador Dali tourism to be had around the area [as Hawk Eye pointed out!] - Cadaques, Figueres etc. But you can read all about that in the guide books!
We toyed with the idea of staying a bit longer there, but one of the things we're finding (of course) is that each new bit of the journey holds out the promise of other delights. So off we set on Saturday 27th December, leaving our pine-branch Christmas tree attached to the maintenance guy's truck-ette, and headed South again. We skirted Barcelona, and came to land just beyond Sitges, described by our Lonely Planet guide as 'the wildest resort on the Catalan coast - attracting everyone from jet-setters to young travellers, honeymooners to week-ending families, Barcelona's night owls to an international gay crowd'. Room for Grey Nomads then?
With love to you all and wishing for you the chance to follow, and achieve, your dreams in 2004. Lots of us have had big changes in the last couple of years since we met, and here's hoping for another year of great support within the group for the good times and the more challenging. And here's hoping for lots of laughter and fun and twinkling for all of you this year - in your hearts and sharing it with others.
!Feliz ano nuevo!
Jeni y Dave
xxx
PS. For those of you fortunate (?!) enough to get the photos that we sometimes include with these mailings, feel free to participate in the ongoing caption competition. This one of Jeni, paddling her tootsies in the Med must surely provoke some comment?! (And wait until you see some of the ones of Dave!)