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Rain, Romans and refusing to go to bed like a sensible adult
We woke under a blue sky. I say “blue sky” — it lasted roughly the time it takes to drink a coffee and feel optimistic about life. By the time we’d checked out of the apartment we’d called home for three weeks, packed the car, and pointed it northward toward Tarragona some 440km away, the heavens had clearly reviewed our itinerary and decided: absolutely not.
Within 30 minutes, the rain arrived. Not the polite, European drizzle kind. The biblical, God-has-had-enough-of-you kind. Visibility dropped to somewhere between “squinting helps” and “are we underwater?” I aquaplaned. Twice. The car briefly became a submarine with wheels and ambitions above its station. I won’t say my life flashed before my eyes, but I did think very warmly about the underground car park waiting for us in Tarragona. When we finally glided into it — damp, rattled, and deeply grateful for concrete ceilings — I may have whispered a small thank you to the parking gods.
First order of business: the covered market across the square, where a tapas stand and a large cold beer restored my faith in the decision to leave the apartment at all.
Tarragona, it turns out, has the good sense to have been built by Romans — people who, unlike me in a rainstorm, clearly knew what they were doing. Founded during the Second Punic War, Tarraco became Rome’s gateway to the Iberian Peninsula, and they left their calling card in the form of a rather spectacular amphitheatre, a forum, an aqueduct, and roughly 400 plaques explaining how impressive everything is. We walked. And walked. And then walked some more, as one does when confronted with 2,000 years of history and a map that keeps suggesting there’s “just one more thing” around the corner.
By evening, we had earned dinner. La Botifarra — a proper Spanish bar, packed to the rafters, loud, cheerful, and entirely indifferent to our need for a table. No matter. We sat at the bar like seasoned locals (or people with no other choice), ordered beers and wine, and worked our way through a couple of tapas that were unusual enough to raise an eyebrow and good enough to immediately order again.
And then — in what I can only describe as a personal record and mild character deviation — there was no nightcap. None. I, a man who has never met an after-dinner drink he didn’t befriend, went straight to bed at a reasonable hour. Two episodes of Netflix, and I was gone. Flat out. Dead to the world.
Five hours in a car through a monsoon, a Roman route march, and bar stool dining will do that to a person.
Tarragona: highly recommended. Getting there in a deluge: less so.
I do it my way 