Lunch at Royal Beach

Tuesday we had double booked, lunch at the Royal Park in Lloret de Mar and then the Medieval banquet at an unknown venue inside a castle for dinner. Trouble was that the coach wasn’t to bring us back from lunch until 18.30 and it was a long way, especially with all the drop offs at the other hotels and our evening coach was for 19.45. At the last minute when the coach arrived I decided to go to our room and fetch the car keys and follow the coach in the car. That way we could come home when we liked. I dashed up the lift, into our room, unlocked the safe, got the keys, locked up again and rushed back down to see the coach disappear into the distance. We rushed off in the wrong direction as the car was on the wrong side of a dual carriageway in chase. Eventually we could see it in the distance and could follow when it turned until we caught it up.

The Royal Beach is another 4 star hotel in the H Top chain and it also is not next to the beach. It had a slightly down-market feel to it compared to ours but they would let us use our all inclusive cards for drinks. Strange that they are not consistant. I have to say that the food was worse than at our hotel and to make matters worse it rained all day so we couldn’t go outside to the pool or to discover Lloret de Mar. Thank goodness we weren’t on the coach and could drive off as soon as we had finished lunch. The rain we are experiencing has been promised by the forecasters from Tuesday until we return so the best of the weather has gone. At least we had two good days at the beginning.

Off we went in search of some shopping centre that Claire had seen an advert for. Eventually we found it and it is called Matara Park. They also had 12 cinemas but when we checked none of the films were in English and were dubbed over rather than sub-titled. As I write this a pneumatic drill has just fired up right outside our window on the street below – joy! At least the kids might get to breakfast for once. We had about an hour around the shopping center and we all finished off with a hot chocolate. Literally a hot chocolate, which had to be spooned out rather than drank – mmm yummy!

Back home in time for a shower and change ready for the banquet. The coach set off on time in the pouring rain stopping at every hotel on the way. Eventually we ended up at a huge castle in the middle of nowhere. As it was still raining but Claire had come prepared with her shower cap from the hotel. We were ushered for photos into a huge main hall where there were approximately 1200 people seated into the sloping sided arena. Quite different from anything I had seen before but it was too dark and big for the camera to pick up. We were entertained with knights on horses doing a kind of dressage thing whilst playing classical music. We felt they should have been playing medieval songs like Green sleeves. We noticed that the hall had four different colours, red green yellow and blue and we were sat in the blue area. Then four different coloured knights came out competing with each other on horseback. Really good and exciting to watch especially as our knight won the first three events. Also we had the British football crowd on our side cheering him on – get the picture? Each time a knight won he was presented a flower from the Queen which he would throw to his favorite girl in the audience. Claire was this girl the last time but we were right at the top so he had to race towards the crowd on his horse and throw the flower as he stopped short of landing on the kids on the front row. Unfortunately it didn’t reach Claire, but at least he tried.