Fear and loathing in Catalonia - part 2

Having qiuckly grown tired of barcelona, we hired a car from AVIS at some extortionate rate, and then ended up being charged about 30% more (some unquoted tax) than they quoted us later on upon returning the car. Damn AVIS. We then drove along the coast down to the town of Tarragona, which appeared to be famous for people standing in big towers, although never found out why exactly. We wondered around during the day looking for some sort of life in the town, and eventually stumbled across a town festival parade going on with dragons, lions and other oddness. All an excuse to drink and keep the kids entertained it seemed, so seeing as we were young, free and without offspring, we drank. But the nightlife of an off-season Spanish town on a Monday leaves much to be desired, and come the evening boredom set in.

The next day we headed on an old roman fort town, complete with castle to walk up the hill to and have a look at. Which we did. We also saw some dressed up girls doing a falconry display which scored highly on the unusualometer and kept up amused for minutes. The next day took us down to another old town, this time with Islamic constructed walls which were free to walk along - although my fear of hieghts stopped me from being able to walk along many of them - I jsut felt sick and dizzy when I even thought about trying.The walls and the town were quite pretty but now we had really grown tired of our "directionless" holiday, sightseeing just wasn't that interesting and the nightlife was none existant - star wars top trumps had become the only way of passing time without winding each other up too much.

The next day we stopped off at some medievel town to see the "hanging buildings" - buildings that were consturcted to literally hang over a gorge... they might have poked out a little, but we felt cheated. The small town food, cheap but still overpriced, left us wanting more of the good cusine we'd picked up in Barcelona - at least we'd have more than beer to look forward to each day - so we pushed the car (or "burro" as it was now known) as hard as we could towards the seaside resort of Gandia, which turned out to be Bendiorn without the nightlife.

It is safe to say at this point, any pretence that this holiday had gone well collapsed - stupid napkin wearing bets were had, tourist beers were brought and tapas food games emerged... we had to get out of here and back to some form of civilisation