Explore europe in a campervan

It’s been a long time between posts, but we’ve been busy entertaining.  Sam was with us for 10 days, most of which were spent on the beach, at the pool and relaxing at the van.  Simon and Sam had a booze-fuelled night in town, which almost ended in a long, long walk home.  Fortunately the last bar at the edge of Tarifa called a taxi for them.  They also had a very energetic session of tennis so I suppose that makes up for the night’s excess.

Over the weekend of the last two days of the PKRA Kite Pro competition the beach and the campsite were both packed.  The Spanish really seem to make the most of every weekend anyway, so the event just drew even bigger crowds.  The tricks being pulled off by the world’s best kite-surfers were awesome to watch, but it was impossible to keep up with the results as the amplified commentary seemed to blow away in the wind!  We checked the progress online most days; particularly of Aaron Hadlow being British and the current world champion.  Unfortunately the judges weren’t on the same wavelength as Hadlow and were scoring technical jumps closer to the water higher than his favoured ‘big airs’ that are so much more impressive for spectators, and he came second overall.

Simon’s kite-surfing is progressing well.  He travels much better up-wind now so there are far less long walks along the beach for me to meet him.  He’s confidently jumping off the waves – up to around 4-5 ft high! And he’s riding toe-side (facing away from the kite) more which enables impressive carving turns, instead of stopping and dropping into the water to start again in the other direction.  Since I decided to have a go at handling the big kite the wind has increased from a daily average of around 12 mph to well over 20 mph so that’s not going to happen any time soon.  I’ve been flying the 3.5 metre Flexifoil Rage kite that I use for land-boarding to keep my hand in.

On Sam’s last day with us we took a trip to Gibraltar.  Simon and I have been so many times now that it doesn’t seem strange, but for Sam it was bizarre seeing British police uniforms, high-street shops like British Home Stores and Mothercare, and prices in pounds when he’s here in Spain on holiday.  We dropped him close to the station to take the cable car up to the top of the rock where he could see the Barbary Macaque apes (actually monkeys but I don’t know what the technical difference is), while we visited our favourite Gibraltan attraction – Morrisons!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.