Cala D'Or was a rather beautiful port.

Although some of my bias may have stemmed from the fresh feeling of un-seasickness, another part came from wonderful deliverance of Spain of that which it offers:

Bright blue skies....

acting as a perfect backdrop for pure white buildings....


And sticky, Mediterranean trees, that smell like home:


Andy, Martin and I headed out for breakfast, at a time that was more appropriate for brunch, but seemed to the Spanish to be ungodly as an hour for the service of food.

We sat down at a cafe brimming with life, most of it Dutch (a crowd of orange-clad people had come to see the crowning of the new king), but were told that it was just too early for any food, so had to move across to the next cafe for some breaky.

It was quite a nice feeling to just sit in the sun, and stock up on some vitamin D after the long, long, long, long winter.

But sooner or later we had to head back to the boat, the plan being to sail at noon.






Cala D'Or is situated in a kind of inlet, and the view on the way out was really quite stunning.



(Alvaro thinks so too)




This... THIS, is sailing weather.

Although, unfortunately, it's not really. The sky was blue and the sea was calm and... there was not the tiniest whisper of wind to be found.

So we had to go by motor.

But I don't think anyone was complaining too much about spending a day gliding through the ocean (on autopilot), sunning oneself, reading a book, occasionally looking up to take some photos or admire some coastline or eat some olives and prosciutto.




(Did I introduce Kuba #2 yet? This one is the Cap'n)





I might note that we all got sunburnt.

Personally, I was working on the belief that
a) my legs never burn,
b) even if they do they tan straight away
c) the Spanish sun is way less harsh (i.e. it is more ozone-y in Spain) that that of Australia
d) my people are Spanish, there should be some sort of natural adaptation thing going on.

So I didn't really apply much sunscreen to my legs.

As a consequence, they spent the rest of the trip lobster red and pulsating with heat (although not too painful thankfully), and later on peeled. They did eventually tan though, but if I get leg-skin cancer in 20 years time, you know that I only have myself to blame.

This is also the reason that I spent almost the entire remaining part of the trip wearing the same dress- a nice long one that protected my upper thighs from any more UV.


We arrived in Cala Ratjada, and after some teething problems that involved the port people wanting us to park our boat against a dock practically in open water (very wavy, very hard to dismount, very bad for the boat because of all the knocking about), we headed to find some dinner.

One of the first things we noticed were the cats:




Heeerre kitty kitty kitty!

And then, we noticed how very very very German everything was.

It is a totally surreal experience as a non-German living in Germany to go to Spain and have everyone assume you are German.

Especially because I'm pretty sure most of the people in Germany can still recognise that I'm an Auslander.

All the waiters would greet you in German, and everywhere offers German translations. All the restaurants served German options- including one store dedicated to Wurst and Doner!

Truly weird though, that the default second language was Deutsch.

Anyway, we headed out to find some fish, presumably served with a side of Kartoffel


GRUPPENFOTO (stolen again from Marta)- possibly one of the only ones with all eight of us



Panorama from Marta, showing the view over the bay

(Photo of Andy looking cute also from Marta)



Sorry for the bad image- it's really quite inappropriate to provide food porn of low quality.