Last night will be remembered as the night of the mosquitos. The rain finally let up about 6pm and everybody in the campground emerged from their campers and began drying things. We joined in the drying frenzy and decided to crank up the heat in François to a sauna like 80 degrees. This succeeded in getting a lot of our things dry, but had an unexpected consequence. When the rain stopped the mosquito population in the camp came out in force. During our coming and going after the rain at least 8 gained access to François. Buoyed by our warm camper they were ravenous. Ton and I spent the rest of the night fighting mosquitos. These were particularly agile mosquitos and my kill to strike rate was very poor. By about 1 am I had managed to kill 7, but at least one was still flying when exhaustion kicked in and I fell to sleep.
Feeling a little battle worn in the morning we decided to head into Peniscola to see what it was like when it was not pouring. It is a picturesque place, in fact it is frequently used in movies and television shows. Most recently it was a location for Game of Thrones as well as a long time ago it appeared in El Cid.
We parked on the waterfront and walked along the beach to the old town. The beach is also beautiful and long. It is about 8 kilometers and lined with hotels and vacation rentals. This part of Spain is some spectacular coast line.
Historically Peniscola is famous as the seat of a pretender pope known as Pope Luna (Benedictine XIII). He was Catalan and during a very complicated period in the Catholic church he was one of two competing popes. He set up his base in Peniscola after he was exiled from Avignon so Peniscola has claim to be one of three sites that have been a Papal base, the other two are Avignon in France, and of course Rome. Eventually he lost the fight and was excommunicated from the church.
We walked around town for about 90 minutes, but after waiting for two days to get to see it we didn’t have time to do it justice. The old town has been occupied for over 1500 years by Carthaginians, Romans, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Spanish. We debated going into the castle, but in the end we decided to move on. I think in a different circumstance we would have been enthralled with Peniscola, and it probably deserves a revisit if we ever pass this way again.
We decided to shift north a couple of hours and selected a campground we had stayed at last year when we were transiting back to Amsterdam from Morocco. Last year we arrived 7 or 8 days later and had a beautiful seaside campground nearly to ourselves. We were expecting that today only to arrive at a packed campground with numerous German families and lots of kids. I’m not sure why all of these German kids are not in school but they do seem to be enjoying themselves.
Our campsite came with a kitten who immediately attached herself to us. She went out of her way to show us a food bowl someone had left for her. We couldn’t resist and fed her so she has now decided that we belong to her. Ton is already planning tomorrows breakfast for her.