Moxie - Beck Family Adventure

La Coruna

Mike, Denise, Asia and Aranya Beck

Thu 29 Jul 2010 22:17

We stayed at the new marina immediately behind the sea wall and the odd looking building. The staff all speak English and rates are quite reasonable compared to the UK, they had a pay for 3 nights and get four deal going so we went for that. As it turned out we had to stay 5 nights as it too that long for the fuel to become available again.

We took the kids for a wee (several kilometre round trip) walk to Torres de Hercules, it is the oldest operating lighthouse in Europe and was originally built by the Romans. It's a long way for a six year old to walk but there was ice cream and a lovely swimming beach to break things up a bit.

Whilst I am on the subject I need to say how fantastic the kids were on the crossing, there was not a single 'are we there yet', 'when will we be there' or 'I'm bored', they went to bed well and the DVD player did not get turned on the whole trip, WOW! Ken was obviously impressed as he handed them each 5 euros sweet money and insisted that the kids be allowed to spend it all on sugar treats in one of the many sweet shops in La Coruna, the only condition was that they are to only be eaten with permission from us so these will last a long time indeed.

Ken we are good to our word.

We ate out that night at one of the many seafood restaurants Denise and I shared a huge seafood platter for two for 35 euros. Should have taken a photo I guess even the locals were doing so, alas picture if you will crab, prawns, mussels, clams, sea snails, shrimps, langastines, and a few other things all presented beautifully on a huge plate. There were some wierd things in there, long thin pencil shaped shellfish were delicious, and some small 'pigs trotters' - no idea what they are called but we recon we saw Gordon Ramsey on TV once collecting these delicacies in Portugal. Well we didn't think they tasted much different to seawater and they were really hard to get into.

After all the walking the next day we decided to dig out the micro scooters, we all have one now they fold into nothing and extend our range and strike speed fantastically. There's no room for four folding bikes so these are as good as we can do, we bought the bigger wheel ones they are alloy and light enough to pass down to a dinghy. In our four days (5 nights) at La Coruna we clocked up quite a few scoter miles indeed.

So here we are 500 miles from home and we are moored next to Lazy Pelican and just down from Jaywalker, two other Royal Clarence boats, go figure. Mind you this is a Trans Europe marina so if we had have kept our card it would be half price like it is for these other guys, darn - we have no idea where that is - half way to NZ in a container no doubt. Laundry took 4 machine loads and Moxie looked like a rag doll for a day or so.

Along the waterfront there are cats, cats, cats and more cats living in the breakwater rocks, I guess they eat the wee crabs or something, mostly they are pretty scrawny. The girls thought that a dog we saw was having a bad day as no sooner had he barked at one cat another one appeared close by, he really didn't know which way to turn. Woof - cat, woof oh another cat, woof - blimey another woo...

In town there was a Medieval market going on with street stalls selling all manner of medieval goods, spices, carvings, jewellery, cow horn ornaments etc. All the vendors were dressed up and a band with pipers and drummers set the scene nicely.

We spent some nice beach days with the girls and it was Bikinis all round, err 3 out of 4 of us anyway. Actually unikinis seem to be all the rage with the very bronze Spanish girls, hope I didn't look too much like the dog did with the cats.

The Sea breeze is something to set your clock by. At 12:30 everyday a Northerly of 4 or 5 develops and lasts till about 9pm. It's quite cooling but in the marina things get a bit noisy, by day 5 we had fuelled up and had enough of the city. Next stop Rias de Ares just 10 miles away in the wrong direction.