02 - Casa Palmer Kirby

When I was in my early twenties I looked back on the family holidays we had as kids and wondered how we had spent the whole two weeks in the same place. Don't get me wrong, I loved our family holidays but I thought that Mum and Dad must have had days where they were a little bit bored.

I then moved to London when I was 24 and the luxury of weekend European trips reinforced this view. I'd regularly claim that you would only need a couple nights in a city before you'd seen most of what there was to offer and could skip on to the next one. I also have the attention span of a gnat and require constant entertainment. This is James' favourite trait of mine.

So, when James suggested that we start our trip with two and a half weeks in a small town in Spain, I was a bit skeptical.

Trevor pulled into the driveway of Casa Palmer Kirby, just outside Purias, at about 2am on 17th July and the neighbours, Jan and Brian, had the villa ready for us. Air conditioning blasting, lights on and the pool looked perfect for a swim the next morning. We both sighed with a smile as we climbed into bed. It had been a busy couple of weeks packing up our flat in Bow and preparing for the eventual move to Australia, so finally making it to the beginning of our trip felt fantastic.

Next morning, I got up, made myself a cup of coffee and sat on the balcony overlooking the fields. I started on a book while I waited for James to get up. I spend most of my mornings waiting for James to get up.

When he did, we agreed that our big adventure for the day would be to the local supermarket to pick up food for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next 3 days. Accustomed to buying my lunch daily in central London and eating out at least 3 nights a week, this had huge novelty factor. Plus, the supermarket had these little plastic trolleys that were pretty fun to push around.

We decided to have one outing a day and going to the supermarket became a regular option. We would go for a run first thing in the morning, then choose between the supermarket, beach, local street market or bowling and finish off the day with a game of tennis. On really special days we'd eat lunch or dinner out in Aguilas or Lorca. We also did a day trip to Cartagena and La Manga, which had the bluest water and whitest sand. James asked me to mention that he beat me at everything. By everything he means running, bowling and tennis. I won at pushing the shopping trolley.

I quickly became accustomed to this routine and my skepticism towards a long period in one place faded. As we passed into the second week at the villa I couldn't believe how quickly time was getting away. We felt relaxed, happy, healthy and the prospect of leaving was a sad one. Boredom hadn't featured in this trip at all.

On the last day as we drove from Casa Palmer Kirby to Alicante airport we decided to take one last detour via Lorca Castle. We mindlessly punched it in to google maps and followed the route set out. We came to a dirt road which is not unusual in these parts of Spain. Google never gets it wrong, so we followed the blue line it was suggesting but the road got progressively steeper and steeper. I asked James to turn back but there was no way we could. 'I think we're committed' he said. After a couple of skidded turns in Trevor we made it to the top and followed the perfectly sealed road back down. I'll put a bit more consideration into the routes we follow from now on.

That's all for now except for a big thank you to Linda and Paul for a wonderful time in their villa.

J & M