Corinne CrawfordI had made a reservation earlier in the week to visit the Salvador Dali house museum and was scheduled to go today at 3:00pm. They take tours of about 10 people every 15 minutes or so. I worked that morning and then walked back to the port town where we tried to kayak several days before as that is where the house was. I waited my turn and started the tour with our guide. The house consisted of several fishing huts that he combined together and apparently everything in the house was exactly as he left it the day his wife died in 1982. He left the house that day and never returned.
Most of the original paintings had been moved to a museum but the two that he was working on that day remained unfinished in his studio.
He liked to paint sitting down so in his studio, he had built a large metal frame with a pulley system and an opening on the floor so he could position his canvas to any height, even being able to paint the very top of it sitting down as he could lower the whole frame down into the floor. I also found the store room with his paints and materials very interesting because it too was left exactly as it was when he left.
The gardens and outbuildings all were very interesting and the whole place definitely had an artist’s vibe.
After the tour, I again walked back to my room and waited until the restaurants opened to grab an early dinner as I was leaving the next day to head to Carcassonne France. I was leaving Spain and it didn’t really occur to me until I was on the train that things might get a bit harder when I left a country I could communicate a little bit in the native language.
I left Cadaques on the bus taking the return route through the hills that I did on the way there making my way to the bus station in Figueres. I would need to wait around a bit for a connecting bus to the train station and spent that time at a tapas café across the street from the bus station. I made it to the train station and bought my ticket for Carcassonne. They only had first class tickets left so it cost me more than it should and to be honest, this first class seat didn’t seem all too different than my other 2nd class seats I had taken before. Did I get scammed? I don’t know,. Either way, I made it to Carcassonne and had been communicating with my Airbnb host about my arrival time. I had booked an entire 1 bedroom apartment that was 15 minutes walk from the train station and 15 minutes walk from the old town and centered in the newer section-although still a medieval city, just modernized a bit. I booked the apartment because I knew I needed to do laundry and wanted to save some money by cooking most of my meals. As it turns out, I didn’t eat a single meal at a restaurant my entire time in Carcassonne. The apartment was beautiful and quite a bargain at only $50 a night.
