Setting Off Again (Or, A Love Letter To Cartagena)

Cartagena, my beloved, my jewel, my princess,

How I shall mourn your elegant marbled streets when we must part at last. What can I do but weep when no longer can I gaze upon the streams of water erupting from your abundant fountains, the roses bedecking your verdant parks? Whose notion to transform this town in the dry, dusty South  into this green and pleasant land?

OK, that style’s getting a little exhausting, but Cartagena really is almost too good to be true, and entirely worthy of a little rhapsodising. And, yes, we arrived to see real grass for the first time in hundreds of miles along the southern Spanish coast, with beautifully tended borders of roses. Not forgetting their two thousand year old Roman amphitheatre, of course, but I can't really give credit to Cartagena's town planners for that.

We actually got quite choked up when it came to leaving. I think we’d have struggled to persuade ourselves to go if we hadn’t decided to come back for this winter; we’ve left our folding bikes and two anchors in the marinero’s office so we don’t have much choice now. Oh, how terrible for us. We’ve had a wonderful six (and a half) months there and we noticed, as we made away further up the coast on our first day’s sail, that we were referring to the place we’d just left as ‘home’.

The concept of ‘home’ existing, for a start, in a sense beyond the boat itself, and of it being somewhere we’ve actually chosen for ourselves, rather than settling for the worst of several bad options, is a new and strange one. It probably would be for most people, but after you’ve headed off on a grand adventure, leaving home behind deliberately, it seems like quite a luxury.

We’re anchored up in Torrevieja harbour currently, feeling a little lost. This isn’t the sort of town it’s worth leaving Cartagena for. We were hardly expecting it to be. The Balearics are the first destination we’re aiming for, and by all accounts they really are worth seeing. But even so, there's a little part of me screaming that she wants to go home.

Oh! And we saw two bottlenose dolphins alongside Jade today. Good omen, right? 

Migrating

As my inaugural entry, I present to you my previous blog location, where you can find a pretty detailed record of our first season's cruising:

Cruising with the Kitties - TravelPod

You served me well, TravelPod, but I'm afraid I'm moving on. I liked your map features, but that was about it. I can't base loyalty upon map features alone. It's not like I can't find them elsewhere.

Here, for example.

You're frustratingly controlling, and it just isn't working anymore. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to steal your map.

So, that's where we've got up to. Except we're not actually in Barcelona now, we're at the previous green dot, Cartagena.

If the weather ever starts behaving itself, we'll be heading to the Balearics, which you can just about make out on that map. And then we'll spent the next several months pottering about there and doing very little indeed, which is just the way we like it.

At the moment, however, we're stuck in Cartagena with strong winds from exactly the wrong direction. We're taking a philosophic attitude towards this, though, as we're not sure we really want to leave here anyway. If the wind blew from the wrong direction all summer - well, I think we'd shrug it off quite easily.

It looks like this here, you see:

More to come when we finally manage to get going - or possibly when we give up altogether and just decide to live here.