Follow mE: The AWESOME BEACH SLAPPING Goodbye

“…Anyway, I kept standing next to that crazy cannon, looking out at the game freezing my ass off. Only, I wasn’t watching the game too much. What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a goodbye… I don’t care if it’s a sad goodbye or a bad goodbye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it…”

For some reason, most of the times I am about to leave a place I immediately remember this ‘scene’ found in the book The Catcher in the Rye (just like, for some reason, whenever I am in a lake or port or a river where there happens to be a green light somewhere in the landscape, my mind instantly associates it with the Great Gatsby and his ‘green-light scene’).

Well, today is not a ‘Great Gatsby-day’ but it is a ‘The Catcher in the Rye-day’, because the time has come to leave Sevilla! A goodbye to another place, but this time we teach Holden Caulfield how you manage to feel an AWESOME BEACH SLAPPING GOODBYE:

Beach slapping goodbye – Stage 1

Rent a car and fill it with AWESOME French, German, English and Guatemalan individuals; let the GPS annoying lady know your destination, music at full volume and depart for an unforgettable road trip!

Beach slapping goodbye - Stage 2

Arrive to your first AWESOME destination. Swim all day and get several, not ‘b%tch slaps’ (‘pardon my French’) but, ‘BEACH slaps’ all over yourself due to excessively strong winds. You feel as if hundreds of bees were ‘stinging’ you with their buts, it is kind of painful.

Beach slapping goodbye - Stage 3

Drive to your next AWESOME destination and extreme sleep on the beach! Because, why pay for a hotel when you can keep on getting “beach slapped” throughout the entire night as well? This is the land equivalent to throwing yourself off an airplane! It just happens to be part of the adventure.

(If by any chance you have any “romantic” idea about sleeping on the beach, try it with a 43 km per hour wind and I am 100% sure that you will change your mind! It becomes even worse when a “unicorn” appears all of a sudden, out of nowhere in the pitch dark running on the beach! Yes, later on we realized that there was not only one “unicorn”, but many “unicorns” and that these “unicorns” were actually horses… almost the same thing!)

Beach slapping goodbye – Stage 4

“Oh sh$t, did we die?”

“…and actually went to ‘heaven’, that is AWESOME!”

Yes, wake up from the extreme beach slapping sleeping just to find yourself in paradise!

Beach slapping goodbye – Stage 5

Play in an AWESOME gigantic sandbox (if only I would have known that these existed back then when I was a kid)!

Beach slapping goodbye – Stage 6

Drive to your next destination and swim in the UN-AWESOMEST, coldest water you had ever swum.

Awesome goodbye – Stage 7

Again fill the car with the AWESOME French, German, English and Guatemalan survivors (along with the dunes of sand they have accumulated by not taking a shower in two days!); let the GPS annoying lady know you are going back to the windless, 40 degree ‘infierno’ called Sevilla; music at full volume and depart back from an unforgettable road trip!

Perhaps by now you are wondering what are the names of this road trip’s destinations; your writer ain’t leaving without letting you know:

So, the three beaches are called: Zahara de los Atunes, Bolonia and Tarifa. All of them in the south of Spain, all of them worth visiting AND, speaking of Orcas in the previous post (“Don’t burn it down!!”), all of them part of the Orca migration route! A big coincidence!

I had no idea about this, but it seems that the free Willys migrate by passing through the Strait of Gibraltar from the beginning of July until late August or early September.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to go this time! After calling every possible Whale Watching place in Tarifa they all said the same thing: The Orcas had not been spotted yet and they do not go on excursions until they are sure the whales have reached the Strait; plus they also were prohibited to sail during the weekend due to bad weather (the strong ‘beach slapping’ levante winds are the guilty ones), so the whale watching remains for the next adventure!

You never know, so, in case you happen to be ‘in the neighborhood’ and are interested to see Free Willys or dolphins, pilot whales or other kinds of whales found in the area (while enjoying the view of the Moroccan coast), I leave you some links -