Yesterday was a long day of touring…and I drove! I went with German Heide Froeysok and Aussie Stephen Dance.

We started towards Cap de Fomentor a nearly two hour drive due to the narrow roads. The route sent us through Area where we saw from the car the Sant Salvador de Artà group of fortified buildings.

The first stop was in Alcudia, which has a lot of Roman ruins. We were able to walk on top of the restored city wall that surrounds the old town. There are lots of narrow streets and of course lots of tourist type shops. I was there last June and the town was pretty deserted, but yesterday…on a Friday, it was packed.

After leaving Alucdia we went toward the Cap de Formentor, up a narrow winding road that was heavily populated with bikers, making driving very challenging, as they were often in the middle of the road. We stopped at the Sa Crueta viewpoint…just past it and hiked up to the walking path. The views from the top were stunning, especially since the sky was a blue as the Mediterranean Sea. After admiring the view we continued on to the Formentor Beach. We were intending to drive up to the lighthouse on the Cap de Formentor but the road was closed and no explanation was given. We visited the nice, small and uncrowded beach and plotted our next moves.

We decided to see more of Mallorca…I suggested Soller, Valdemossa and Deia on the west coast of Mallorca.

Soller is a very pretty town with a lovely church in an active town square. The streets are narrow and old and feature the typical Mallorca stone facades with dark green shutters. There’s also a train that goes from Palma to Soller via Bunyola, and a wooden tram that goes down to the port, but we wandered around the streets, got a bite to eat and some ice cream and moved on to Valdemossa and Deia.

Valdemossa from the road is very pretty, terraced up the side of a hill. It’s famous for its Charterhouse, a palace in the center of town, surrounded by more narrow Mallorca streets on one side and pretty gardens on the other side. We walked around the Charterhouse, then, with the sun getting low drove on to Deia.

Deia is a small town up in the mountains of Mallorca. Deia is perched in a ravine at the foot of the Teix mountain, with views out to the Mediterranean below, and is known as an artist colony. It also has some spectacular ancient olive orchards…the trunks of the trees are gnarled and really interesting. Robert Graves home is a museum there. The people we saw on the way to restaurants were dressed really nicely, much less casual than is typical in Mallorca.

And then it was back to Font de Sa Cala…a long but fun day.