We knew things would always come down to the wire. No matter when we start packing, cleaning, organising ourselves for departure, the last day is always very busy. Most of Sunday was spent finishing off the cleaning, however, we still had our coffee at Le Comptoir - some things just can't be missed out. At 6:30pm the place was spotless. Apero was booked at a friend's house, and we had a very enjoyable evening with a bunch of friends, all leaving Ceret within the next week or so. Everyone will be returning again before we do though. At this stage we're not planning to return until towards the end of August.
After a late night we woke up pretty groggy on Monday morning, though mostly it was because of broken sleep. Firstly we started getting the kerosene smell coming in from the bakery at 3:20am, then we were re-woken with horrible scratching sounds seemingly coming from the ceiling in the bedroom. John ended up thumping loudly on the wall of the spare room to successfully make it stop. We figure it's either a rat that has found a nice warm cavity inside the wall, or perhaps a rat eating something from the guttering on the roof. Either way it was very disturbing, not least so because we have no immediate way of tackling the problem, and our lovely tenants arrive on Tuesday! We mentioned it to Jean-Christophe, who runs the pizzeria below us, he says he feeds poisoned grain to rats who emerge from time to time. We hope this might do the trick. Failing that perhaps we can ask him, via our tenants, to get up into our mezzanine and throw poisoned grain from our skylight into the gutters on the roof. I hope it goes away and we don't hear from our tenants.
So, feeling pretty shot, we were up early, ate the last of the food in the house for breakfast, stopped off at Le Comptoir to say farewell to Sebastian, the cafe owner, and were very cheered to also get farewells from a lovely group of retired guys who regularly meet up at Le Comptoir for morning coffee, farewell from Madam Delard (who lived opposite us in Place de l'Eglise) and a few other locals we bumped into. A final au revoir to Jean-Christophe and we loaded the last of our gear into the car and set off for Barcelona at midday.
We still couldn't quite believe we were leaving Ceret. I had packed a few remaining bits of cheese and we'd picked up a apple pastry from our friendly baker, so had some nibbles to sustain us until we arrived at our destination near Barcelona Airport. Arriving at 2pm, we made sure we secured one of the hotel car parks. We could leave the car within the compound for free for the 10 days we are in Fez. We will be flying in around midnight upon return, so will spend that night back at the same hotel.
To be honest, we were feeling pretty knackered. After check-in we wandered to the old town of Castelldefels nearby, had a coffee and nibble, then back to rest and nana-nap until retracing our steps to a Chinese restaurant we'd spied around the corner for dinner. The meal was very average but filled a need. The restaurant didn't open until 8pm but we were tucked up in bed by 10pm. Needless to say we both slept extremely well.
Breakfast was on until 10:30am (the joy of being in Spain) but we were downstairs by 9:30am for a great breakfast. That left an hour or so to relax until we had to check out at midday. We stowed our cabin bags back in the car while we went for a quiet wander. The flight out wasn't until 7:45pm so we had heaps of time to fill in.
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| Massive Zirkus Raluy circus setting up in Castelldefels |
This part of Barcelona, Castelldefels, is nothing special, but had a good number of shops and cafes, including a very interesting design shop that had us thinking about our next house, wherever that may be. We filled in our time successfully before going back to collect our bags from the car and catching a convenient bus to the airport in mid-afternoon. No issues at the airport, and before we knew it, we were off to Morocco via the pleasures of Ryanair.
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