The missus and I haven’t been overseas together in ages. Probably since Australia I think. I’m always on a bloody plane somewhere lately! It was her birthday at the beginning of June so I decided to ship us out to Spain for a week, she got to choose the location. For something done on a whim it turned out to be a pretty incredible holiday. She booked one of those Thomson package holiday things in a little place called Salou, the people were as you can expect, a bit like someone had done a talent scout across Britain’s council estates, admitted defeat and just picked anyone. I can say that because I grew up on estates so fuck off! :p

The hotel was lovely, a 4 star behemoth with an all you can eat buffet. I could never eat all that some people could eat. Standing next to them in the queue made me feel a bit ill their plates were stacked so high. I think I’ve found the answer to why Britain is getting fat! The first day we arrived in the afternoon and had to wait for our rooms so we got a couple of Jack Daniels and sat by the pool. Nice way to break it in. Second day tried more of the same but the people were shit and the music was shit and I can’t sit down all day, I’m too restless. So then we spent our days either down at the beach walking the huge length of it or sitting in cafes watching the world go by. A special mention goes out to the Villa Alexandra where the food is literally, actually and totally to die for!

On her birthday we went to Tarragona, a neighbouring town about 20 minutes and 25EUR away (I love the EUR, I wish we had it in this country!). It’s where the Romans originally settled in Spain so there are a ton of old ruins there. While looking for these ruins we were walking up a main road which was incredibly loud so I pulled us into an alleyway and followed it down. To be met by this:

I think this is the town hall and it’s in this gorgeous little courtyard area full of cafes and amazing apartments that I would really like to live in:

With ace side streets ripe for bombing up and down on a scooter:

This led us to the only ruin we had time to see, it was the old entertainment stadium where they either raced horses or watched people kill each other for fun:

And saw this little guy:

Here’s an overhead view of that area:

From which I took this:

And this impressive panorama that turned out great after stitching:

The tunnel in the above picture is this:

Which leads to another building which has a fantastic model of how the town used to look:

You can climb to the top of that which is about as high as the Monument in London I reckon and I took this panorama:

And some other pics:

Here is the old amphitheatre. I bought the wrong ticket so I wasn’t allowed in!

Tarragona is just the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. Probably helped by the gorgeous weather but it trumps anywhere we went in Australia for sure! We’re going back there next year for the missus’ 40th and I think we’ll spend the whole week there with maybe a day trip to Salou. So kind of the reverse of this trip really.

Back in Salou, they had an evening dancing water fountain show thing. I went to the place I thought it was. I was wrong! But, I got some great pictures and when I went to the actual place for the dancing fountains, well, I wasn’t impressed. It was good but not brilliant. I was perfectly happy with the pics I took of the smaller one. Less people too. Nobody filming it on a fucking iPad!

It looks like a portly tummy there but it’s just my shirt rolled up (over my portly tummy!)

So, there you go! One package holiday completely veered away from to do our own thing. The package served to take us to a place we probably would never have chosen and that would’ve been a damn shame, so thanks Thomson!

I’ve booked two more holidays this summer, just some short breaks in Yorkshire. One to York and one to Bridlington. It’s not quite as alluring but hey-ho!