Coast path to Catalunya

It was a quiet day, finishing off my Sunday sermon, going out to the Carrefour hypermarket for some heavy shopping and diesel fuel for the car. It'll be a while before I get the measure of its consumption, and the readout from its digital fuel gauge. Better safe than sorry, so I filled up. Mission accomplished, I sat and watched Murray take the first set in his Wimbledon semi-final match, then began to feel restless, in need of physical exercise. 

Yesterday I found an excellent English leaflet on the walking trails around Vinaròs. As there's a coastal path going north to the boundary where the region of Catalunya begins, and a little nature reserve in the last mile of the excursion, I decided to follow it, joining the coast path at Cala del Pinar - all told, it's a distance of about 6km each way from home. 

The local coast road shuttle bus service runs half hourly, and it turns around in the parking area just at the south entrance to the nature trail section. For a shorter walk the shuttle bus is most convenient, although it was noticeably empty on the occasion I saw it pass. I guess the full flood of holidaymakers and other users has yet to arrive.

As I started the path, photographing the dozen coves and beaches as I went, my phone rang. It was Ashley, ringing from CBS HQ in Cardiff, reporting on a regional security conference attended yesterday by the team. Julie the new admin assistant also had some questions about record keeping to ask. I admit that I enjoyed walking, talking business on the phone and photographing at the same time. It's good to stay in the loop at an interesting time in the development of the organisation. To do so in such a lovely environment is both a privilege and an invigorating experience - so much so, I walked both ways.

The nature trail runs through terrain which remains as it was when used as agricultural land before coastline urbanisation coastline began. The boundary Riu de la Senia river wasn't quite the dried up barranco I'd expected, like many others locally. Just behind the beach where it flowed out into the sea, was a stretch of water visible for a few hundred metres, surrounded by lush greenery and trees. If it was flowing water, it moved slowly and seeped out through a bank of pebbles containing it on the foreshore. It didn't look stagnant, and it may have been the issue of the brief spell of heavy rain we had yesterday.

The batch of photos I took can be found here.