La Coruña, Spain

This morning we docked in La Coruña, right at the tip of northern Spain.  Here’s our view from our cabin. 


We gathered in the auditorium, where a very efficient young woman started on time (no higher praise!) and swiftly dispatched us to our buses.  There things went downhill. Our tour guide spoke mostly unintelligible English, so we soon tuned her out.  Inexplicably (and not mentioned in the tour description), we stopped for 30 minutes at the Tower of Hercules. I dutifully exited the bus and took a photo, but some people didn’t get off at all.


Then we drove for almost an hour (with the guide chirping all the way) to Betanzos, where we walked around for a while and saw these churches.


I took one photo of one of the very steep streets.
The architecture was interesting, as most of the apartments had glass-enclosed balconies.  Our guide explained that today’s sunny, warm weather was very unusual, because La Coruña’s weather is usually like Scotland! Lots of rain, most days, she said, so the glass balconies let in light and provide more indoor space.


Then the guide said we had 45 minutes of free time.  Most of us needed bathrooms by then, so we all went to cafes and bought water so we could use their facilities.  Can you tell we were unhappy by this point? When we reboarded the bus, we rode a long way up and down a mountain to get a glimpse of the dictator Franco’s former summer home. Seriously?  Finally, we headed back near the port to a nice hotel where we’d been promised wine and tapas. They poured us a glass of wine and eventually served us a grand total of TWO different tapas. One was cherry tomatoes and mozzarella balls on a toothpick. The other was more interesting, a nicely seasoned potato salad on a cracker topped with half a shrimp. Period! We weren’t the only disgruntled people.  I suppose we have finally learned that we are NOT fans of the RC-sponsored bus tours. We plan to cancel the others we pre-booked. We were starving upon our return , so went to Windjammer and built salads.

Tomorrow is another sea day, as we head towards Madeira.  I hope I’ll have a less cranky report tomorrow!

Comments

  1. RachelJune 4, 2024 at 1:24 PM

    That is insane! I hope that you are able to leave reviews for some of these tours that aren't so good.

    ReplyDelete

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