The spanish inquisition

The overnight ferry to Mallorca had one redeeming quality, 5.90 euro jugs of sangria. Everything else was awful. An overnight ferry is like an overnight plane ride if you cannot sleep. Unfortunately the cabins were booked out.  It would have been nicer to have a bed to lie on, especially on the back of the Barcelona weekend. Anyway we cat napped on the bus like seats in the "Pullman's Class" area and woke up feeling horrible.

When the boat docked at 7am we went down to the cargo hold to get the car and drove out of the ship. The local policia signaled with their hands for us and the guy in front of us to pull over. The guy in front of us had a black BMW, was from Romania and looked like a drug dealer. The policia, after searching the BMW's boot, asked for our passports and probably said a few other things we didn't understand.

After them looking at our passports in confusion and running our car number plates came back and said something about us not having stamps. I think he asked how long we're here for and I said about 3 weeks. This caused some confusion and they took our passports again and looked through them. We were waiting around for about 20 minutes, I was thinking at first they were going to make us go to some kind of border control area to get a Spanish stamp, but after some back and forth and a lot of hand movements we worked out that they just didn't see our Paris stamps which we showed them. I think this took about 2 years off Heidi's life but I of course was completely relaxed. Anyway it was completely unexpected to get this kind of going over.

Given the green light by the local polisia and breathing a sigh of relief, we headed into Palma for a 2euro cafe and tomato toast and then continued onto our hotel in port of Soller. Soller port is a sleepy beach town and we dropped the car off and had a look around. Since it was 11am by this time, it was obviously sangria and cervesa time. All of the cafes/bars have exactly the same view of the beach with aqua water so you can't really go wrong unless you order some tapas, which at the first bar was tinned mushrooms with garlic. For dinner we had some 9 euro plate of tapas which I'm pretty sure was all frozen and reheated, but for 9 euro what are you going to do?

The port of Soller, (yes the famous Soller sauce is made here).

All of the bars here had the same dumb old view.

The next day we got up and went for a swim in the lovely water, then jumped in the car and went to Fornalutz, a nearby town, which is very picturesque. It provided Heidi with a lot of opportunities to capture some of her favourite scenes, an alleyway with nice architecture and a really old church.

We then drove into the township of Soller, winding through the orange and lemon groves and had some lunch and an icecream. When we got back to Soller port I decided to shave my head. This was not ideal as Heidi didn't like it much and insisted I wear a hat when we went out. I thought it was awesome because not brushing my hair and applying sunscreen is a lot easier for holidays. Anyway I think she relaxed a bit after a cava sangria. (This is the first time I've heard/seen this but instead of a red sangria you get a white one and they use cava instead of vino tinto).

All full of sangria we rented a paddle boat which is powered by you cycling the peddles. We peddled out past the bay and around to the cliffs. The water out here was a fair bit deeper, but you could still see the bottom and it was really blue. There were a lot of people on the rocks and some of the lads were jumping off the cliffs. We were pretty tired by this time, because we're horrible fatties from all the food we've been scoffing so we peddled back into shore before the full 1hr we'd paid for was up.

View from the little peddle boat.

Yes I shined my head in the shino-ballo

For dinner we were kind of jack of tinned/frozen food and decided to head to a bar on the beach which I think is recommended by trip advisor. This was a great move as we finally able to have some delicious freshly cooked tapas and the staff were very friendly.