Tuesday, September 22nd - Salou, Spain

Today was another not too busy day for me.  I got up around 8 and showered and got dressed for the day and had a bowl of cereal and some juice for breakfast.  This morning was cool and refreshing and it seemed like a great time to do some laundry so that's what I did and it took hours for a single load.  These new machines may be water savers but they are certainly not time or electricity savers.  I just have the washer and not a dryer so I had to hang everything on the rack out on the patio to dry and I think all but one pair of socks dried faster than they got washed.  Regardless of the time, it was nice be able to do some laundry at a relaxed pace and somewhere comfortable I could still be doing other things - instead rushing at a laundry mat.

I did some more blogging and sorted through some papers.  I then tried to get my pictures all caught up and that's when I hit a snag.  I just upgraded my machine to the latest operating system yesterday, and now I can no longer download pictures from my camera to my iPad, where I sort them and then load them into Google Drive for safe storage.  I tried everything I could think of and kept getting stymied with every approach.  About 3 p.m. I decided I'd had enough and decided to get ready and go to the beach for the rest of the afternoon.

Today I went to the beach right in front of my apartment.  It is always way busier and nosier than the other beach about six blocks down behind the marina but I decded to give it a try anyway.  Well, I lasted for about half an hour.  It was so windy and the sand is so soft that you were continually getting pelted with sand.  By my logic, the wind was coming from a direction where it would not be as strong behind the marina so I packed everything up and went walking down the shoreline wading in the water.  The water is cool but not bad on the feet.  I'm sure once you got in for a swim it would be fine.  However, the wind would be cold when you got out.  People who hadn't even been in the water were sitting with towels wrapped around them at the beach I was leaving.

I left the sand just before the marina and continued barefoot along the side of the marina, down the street in front of it and over to the other beach.  You wouldn't believe how clean their streets and beaches are over here.  There are always people cleaning up and, although I don't normally walk around much in my bare feet, I felt quite safe doing so here.  I got to the other beach and got comfortable and it was lovely with just a light breeze blowing - much warmer and less sand blowing than at the other beach.

I stayed down there until just after 7 p.m.  Then I packed up and headed back to the apartment.  I stopped at the Tourist Information place again to find out were the farmers' market might be so I could get some fruit and vegetables.  Apparently it is the building right beside the grocery store that I've been going to.  I guess I'll have to wander over there tomorrow to get some things.

Once back at the apartment I had some dinner and once again tried to download some pictures.  The same process that has worked all along no longer works because instead of showing thumbnails on my iPad of all the pictures on my camera, it only shows about 2,500 thumbnail squares with no picture in them and then it stops.  And this is not an internet problem because I am doing this by cord between the two devices.  It has worked fine up until now so I have to assume it is a problem with the new software I just loaded.  If it was just a problem of having too many pictures, it would still show all of those that I've already loaded but it doesn't do that.  I may have ot try and go back to the old operating system if I can figure out how to do that.

And on that happy note, I think my day is completed and I should head to bed.  I want to be up reasonably early to go for a long walk tomorrow to see some of the sights in town.  The one trail I want to take is 2.4 km along the coastline so I figure that with the extra sights on the way back it will be at least 6 km before I get finished - and I'd like to do that before it gets too hot.