Hi there,
I didn´t get a chance to type last night, since we wanted to get packed up. I wanted the girls to be free to enjoy their last day here in Mallorca. So we stayed up until about 10:30 getting organized.
Yesterday we had breakfast at the hotel and then drove to Palma at 9:30. We found my favorite painter at the cathedral again and bought a couple more paintings from him. He´s a very nice guy. I had bought two paintings from him the first time we went to Palma, and never saw any that I liked better. He let Claire pretend to paint for a picture. She was fascinated to watch him. I´m going to have to find someone who paints for her to learn from.
We found our way to an underground shopping mall that Mandy had recommended, and bought a small carry-on for all our souvenirs. Our suitcases are too big to carry on for the smaller planes.
We met Mandy and Savitri downtown and wandered a bit. And then it it was time to head for Marina´s, where we had lunch and stayed for a nice visit. They live in an apartment in Palma, and it has an incredible terrace on top of the building that is theirs alone. Someone in their family built that beautiful oven from scratch! That´s how we cooked the homemade pizzas. The kids played cards in Spanish, and they all did a little concert where they played the pieces they knew on the piano. They also told lots of jokes in Spanish and in English, and was fun to notice what was funny in translation and what wasn´t.
We left around 5 to meet other families at a park in Palma. When you park, they let you take bicycles for free to ride around. There was a huge castle play structure, and we celebrated one boy´s eleventh birthday.
The girls had been waiting all day to swim again in the hotel pool. So I brought them back around 7. They swam for hours, and we had crepes again for dinner.
Today the girls will swim here again in the morning, and then we´re heading for another gorgeous beach, this one with caves you can swim into. No thank you! :-) I heard there´s no shade there, so I bought an inexpensive beach umbrella, and we´ll give it to Mandy when we leave.
Our last day in Mallorca! The girls are starting to get a bit homesick. Besides missing Dale, I´m just looking forward to living in a place again that doesn´t have cockroaches. That´s been the only unpleasant thing about this hotel. About every night, I see one very large, very fast beetle in our place. BLECK. Mandy has been on fishing boats as a marine biologist, and does she ever have stories to tell about what kinds of critters you find in your bed. These have only been on the floor in the kitchen and bathroom, so as I always say, there´s always a bright side! I told the people at the front desk, and they said they can spray. But I don´t want bug spray around the kids. So we´ll just put up with them for one more night. I find that if you turn on a big light and don´t look for a minute, it gives them time to scurry out of sight. (!)
Time to head for breakfast.
Kathy