Sometimes,
more and more often as I get older, I wonder if life has already been
mapped out for each of us, as if each of us has our own jigsaw of
life and the individual pieces of the jigsaw fit into that larger
picture as and when the time is right for them to fit in.
Sometimes
I feel that I'm in the driving seat of the entity that is Des but
perhaps the route I'm taking has already been mapped out. Even if I
occasionally turn off from that pre-planned route I always seem to
end up back on it, going in the right direction.
Russians
have a phrase for it, от судьбы не уйти, which means
you can't get away from fate. It may indeed be fate, or perhaps God
himself is steering us individually in the right direction. Whichever
view you subscribe to, and I confess I'm leaning more towards the
latter these days, it could well explain why I'm sitting typing this
blog at 6 o'clock on a Sunday morning in a 2* hotel in Tortosa in
Spain.
I've
mentioned before, on social media, that I quite fancy walking the
Camino de Santiago. There are several different routes and I had been
considering what is known as 'the English route' from Ferrol down to
Santiago de Compostela, a route of perhaps 120km. I've had a bit of
time on my hands this week and have started to think about going to
Ferrol, on Spain's NW coast to recce the start point (time spent on
reconnaissance is never wasted!). It's easy to forget that Spain is a
big country. Salou to Ferrol is a distance of more than 1,000 km: 9
hours by car, 13 hours by train, or less than 2 hours (but more than
£100) by plane from Barcelona to A Coruna.
Why
it popped into my head I shall never know but suddenly I thought
about visiting Tortosa. One hour on the train from Salou at a cost of
just over 4 Euros with my 'senior rail card', and 30 Euros for B&B
for 1 night. It's only a single room with no room to bring in a cat,
never mind swing it, but the bed is larger than a standard single and
the room is perfectly adequate. I shall see later what they mean when
they say a 'buffet breakfast' is included. I shall also discover
whether the 7 a.m. start time uses the rather more flexible Spanish
clock.
Allow
me to, finally, get to the point of the blog. I arrived here
yesterday afternoon and started looking on the internet for things to
do. I stumbled across a site called wanderlust and there found
reference to the Vies
Verdes,
(or green routes) disused railway lines that have been converted into
scenic (and largely flat) walking and cycling trails. "The Baix
Ebre Greenway, a 26km section of the old Val del Zafán railway, is
particularly enticing. From the former station of El Pinell de Brai,
the route runs via red-rock ravines, limestone caves, orange-blossom
meadows, impressive viaducts and tunnels, and the Ebro River to reach
the historic city of Tortosa".
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All
that remains for me to do today is visit the bus station and see if
there is a bus to the far end of the route - I don't particularly
want to do 26km to then turn around and do 26km back again! Having
completed my recce, I plan to return another time.
Tortosa
is a lovely town, if only it didn't suffer from that particularly
Spanish malaise of not opening its restaurants for dinner until 8pm.
I can't change their culture but I can choose to put my money into
the pockets of Indians, or in this case Pakistanis, who have the
required entrepreneurial skills to open their eating establishments
at a more reasonable, for me at least, time. And a nice kebab it was
too!
P.S. Breakfast was fine, but I get quite grumpy when I see people sneaking stuff out for their lunch - to me that suggests the hotel will need to raise its prices to cover its costs so I'll have to pay more next time.
