Day 48: Ses Salines to Portocristo

April 6, 2025

Heart

Comment

I started off today with anchovies, marinated sardines, capers, sundried tomatoes, pickled peppers, and marinated seaweed. It was all pretty good, but it paled when they brought me the fried eggs and bacon, and I added baguette and cheese. Also this time I reached into my pocket and brought out some sea salt (and lint) from yesterday. It added a lot of zip to the eggs!

Our ride started again with the small lanes, lined with stone walls. This has quickly come to be what we expect, and it makes us dramatically happy to think that we have discovered a warm and beautiful place that has this feature. Near Ses Salines there is a cactus display garden, something we missed going into yesterday. But this time we passed near the back of it, and got to see cactus planted almost like a vegetable crop.

The laneway "deteriorated" a little bit, becoming narrower and with not so well made walls. But still perfect for cycling, right?

Soon that other feature that had so caught our attention asserted itself - the meadows of flowers. Here below are some sheep enjoying the environment as well. They are among poppies, which added a new type of colour for us today.

Happy sheep (assuming they find flowers tasty).

Different flower mixes could be found in different fields.

We actually do have a daisy field like this at our place.

We were having a lot of fun too spotting and photographing birds, some of which are shown a little later in this post. But for the next photo, a bird had ducked down into the meadow, and I thought he was in my sights when I snapped the photo. Not so. But the photo still shows the incredible diversity of the meadow!

That's how the morning went, and we can only repeat how much fun we found it to be.

We did pass more than one of these towers - not a mill, not a watch tower - maybe grain storage?

I was thinking of recording various flowers again, but I remembered when we first started putting in more birds, we could not remember what people had identified for us previously, and embarrassingly kept asking "What's this?". Don't want to repeat that for flowers! But at least I am sure this plant is new:

Though most of the ride was in the countryside, we did pass though one town: Felanitx. Really hard to pronounce. I looked up its origin:

The name comes from the Latin "fenalicius" a place where fénas (Latin fenum, hay), grows. In Castilian Spanish, Felanitx is called Felanich. The people of Felanitx are called "Felanitxer". Interestingly Felanitx is also a centre of caper production. Capers are apparently important in Mallorcan cuisine, helping to explain why I found them at breakfast.

We came upon a market in operation, and waded in, though it had no food component.

At that point there was a little bit of food preparation going in, in the form of what looked like some paella getting going, plus a churro stand.

There were two large woks, each with a different form of what looked like chicken spare parts.

The churro stand had its signage in Spanish, I guess, since we take "churro" to be Spanish for "fritter", plus German, and English, I guess. The English was "doughnutflavour". OK. It was mainly the German that I thought significant.

In the church, there is the customary focus on Mary.

Whoever this is looks very uncomfortable.

Time to leave town and return to the quiet countryside.

The fun glitched for a bit as we ran into this and decided to retreat.

Let's have a bird interlude, because things on the road are about to get a bit tougher.

A rare example of a Red Kite perched, not high in the air.

Thekla's Lark - quite similar to the Crested Lark

This is a second one - they are everywhere!

Once we retreated from that spur after Felanitx, we made our way down to first on bigger road - the one going east - and then another - going north. These roads were not horrible, but they did have moderate traffic, little shoulder, and some hills. They also represented something of a detour, and had us arriving in Portocristo both a little too late and a little too tired to search out the Dragon Cave tour. Next time!

Once we had settled into our again quite nice hotel, the Marina Drach, we checked the route that would be suggested by cycle.travel for our journey tomorrow to Alcudia. Cycle.travel is the only algorithm we know with a switch to shut out unpaved roads. And yes, the cycle.travel route varies quite a bit in spots from what we had, which was probably from Google Maps. We also noticed that there is something of a mountain that can be partly in our way, so some noticeable climbing could creep into what has been, to us, idyllic quite flat days of late. We'll have to stoke up on capers, or something, to power us through to Alcudia!

How about a few more birds from today, then bed time!:

Today's ride: 55 km (34 miles)
Total: 1,313 km (815 miles)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	4
Comment on this entry	Comment	0