This time it is Beño who is normal and Sabriñita who is italics.

Sabrina brushed her teeth and lay down. I went into the bathroom for my turn. In the two minutes before I returned, she was out. Room lights on, blankets only half pulled up, heavy breathing, unresponsive.

It was glorious. I’ve never felt so alive while being half dead.

10 hours later, we woke up to munch some flaky chocolate pastries and make ham cheese and cucumber sandwiches for our walk along the Mediterranean coast.

Begur felt asleep in the still, cool morning. We speedwalked down the main road out of town, listening to birdsong and admiring the red, yellow, and white wildflowers growing in the ditches. Just as traffic started to pick up a bit, our route dove onto smaller streets and gravel lanes between vineyards and olive groves.

We had been debating for some time exactly how to handle the logistics. Do we bus one way? Drive since we paid for the car anyway?

Last night we finally decided: neither. We’d shortcut down to Llafranca across country, on roads and dusty back lanes to start the southern half of our coast walk, then return back to Begur. Tomorrow we’d do a loop of the north half and then drive to Palamos to see a few highlights around there with no long point-to-point.

I was happy because it didn’t involve driving and parking and complex logistics. Sabrina was happy because she could use her apps and Garmin watch to optimize our route. We only got a little bit lost once, but Sabrina’s watch told her we had missed our turn, and we were soon on a terrace overlooking the Llafranca beach.

Truly the star of this trip has been my Garmin Forerunner 255, sold in the fitness tech store nearest you. I’d go on about it, but I’ll spare you Ben’s fate. His marital duties are to love me through sickness and health, and say “yes dear, that IS a great watch feature.”

So great. Anyway, from the beach we switch-backed up hundreds of wide stone steps along the cliffs until we were high enough to see the pattern of waves reflecting against the cliffs.

They formed a huge blue grid with evenly spaced white foam peaks that drift in and out in unison. We came out onto more steep winding roads that took us to a lighthouse (closed) and the site of village from the 6th century BCE.

Turns out that long before it became a refuge for hot Barcelonians seeking Mediterranean leisure, this area was occupied by an Iberian settlement called Sant Sebastian de la Guarda. We’ve been learning a good bit so far about Spain’s civil war years, so it was really neat to dig into its pre-Roman history.

We entered a pine forest, but not anything like we have in Alberta. The red earth showed through sparse undergrowth, and the pines spread above us more like an oak tree in shape than the dense, Christmas-tree spruces of North America. There, paths began to spiderweb in all directions. We noticed we were generally following red and white striped blazes, but then Sabrina’s watch seemed to point to a shortcut. So we left the blazed trail and took a narrower trail that would keep us closer to the ocean. It was no shortcut.

Okay at the risk of sounding like a mother throwing herself in front of her child before it’s shot, it wasn’t the watch’s fault. T’was I who plotted the track, and thought a trail nearer the coast would be better. More scenic. And I think it was more scenic than the prescribed GR92 route that runs the length of the Costa Brava.

More scenic, but punishing. A rollercoaster of steep ups and downs on often loose, sandy slopes. When we came to a rickety table and chairs overlooking a secluded gravel beach, our legs were toasted.

Admitting defeat, we decided to rejoin the official trail. On my downloaded trail map (see above, under app obsession) I could see that we were only a few hundred metres from the GR92. Success! Red & white stripes welcomed our return to civilized hikerdom. We made it a blissful, level-surfaced couple-hundred metres before the path promptly dove to the right. We popped out at the same secluded beach we’d been just about to descend to.

We tried to tell ourselves that our way was much easier and it was worth it. We didn’t believe our guff then and we certainly don’t now. But we did resolve to just stick to the red and white blazes from then on. Sometimes one guide is better than two.

Enter: a series of idyllic beaches, charming pueblos, and sweeping panos. The day got warmer and warmer, and the four litres of water we’d brought were quickly diminishing. At the town of Fornells, we looked for a place to fill up our bottles but came up empty (pun intended). This was a pity, because immediately after Fornells we had the biggest climb of the entire hike looming over us. Gaining 300m of elevation in the space of a kilometre, the exposed hillside would bring us close to Begur, our starting point. It was a grind, and at one point we needed to use our hands. When we reached the top my mouth was tacky and dry while my brow, upper lip, and back were soaked.

We pushed to one more mirador overlooking the area, then started the short trek back to our hotel. After chugging a litre of water each, we scarfed a whole thing of fancy cheeses and strawberries and relaxed until evening. Just before sunset, we continued our tradition of going to a tienda the top of the town for tomorrow’s groceries. The patios of every restaurant were packed with late diners sipping wine and laughing in the long shadows of the buildings. On the way back, we stopped to watch the sun peek in and out of clouds on its final descent, filling the cobble streets with pink and gold light.

The next day was more of the same. Blue sky, beaches, and many stone stairs. We started by taking a pleasant shady path down to the Sa Tuna beach.

This time, our guide was a white and green blaze. The path stayed lower to sea level (whereas many of the first day’s beaches were separated by high hills), so the reward to effort ratio was even better than yesterday. There was also something about the geometry of the windy staircases that particularly tickled Sabrina’s fancy.

I think I literally gasped out loud when I saw it. The spirit of a fainting damsel possessed me and I clutched my chest as I turned the corner to face one particularly handsome set of stairs that wound down to a teensy aquamarine inlet.

Hire whoever did the photo of a boulder in the sea because they really managed to make a pretty ordinary rock seem worth a side trip. We were lured. We saw it. We said, “huh. OK.” We hiked up and around it to see if it looked interesting from another vantage point. We shrugged and turned around and faced what we had been dreading: a steady grind back up to Begur in the early afternoon heat.

Fire whoever gave us that expectation, because the reality was a gently graded climb in the shade of a ravine. We followed a stream overhung with very old-looking trees. Immaculate vibes the whole way.

On arriving at our hotel, we made ourselves fancy cream cheese and smoked salmon bagels for lunch, and re-geared for excursion #2 of the day, a drive south to Palamos and a short out-and-back. Unfortunately, we started in the 4pm heat.

The wilt began without warning. One minute I was holding up nicely, hiking into the sea breeze; the next the sun was bearing down on me full throttle. The large naked woman I saw bathing in a cove started to look real smart. By the next beach I was reduced to a simpering shuffle. Ben tried to ply me with water and a snack bar.

You had become quarrelsome regarding the snack bar. It is this tiny 2-bite hit of sugar and you insisted you only wanted one bite even as you showed the lethargy and confusion of a hypoglycaemic diabetic.

Harsh but fair. Mine was a malady only the full body submersion could fix. So Ben manned our backpacks while I waded fully clothed into the ocean. Would it be dramatic to call it a baptism? Probably. But regardless, I emerged a new woman. We set off towards a Puig (which we inferred is Catalan for peak).

It was a long, forested ascent, and while Sabrina claimed to be just as tired as me and kindly agreed to head back to the car, I suspect she would have been fine to continue to some botanical gardens, just one more big descent ahead.

A short car ride, a shower, another sunset walk to the tienda, a late pizza dinner in the hotel, and then bed.