Downhill walks to the harbor - What a view!

Downhill can be a challenge!

I never really expected the downhill walks to be challenging at times until we actually moved in here. I of course knew that uphill could be a battle (especially during the hottest months of the year) but the downhill issues sometimes are also challenging! I don't know if you've ever been to Spain and if you ever noticed the (sort of similar) tiles they use for the sidewalks. I remember them being a bit slippery in our other town but it was quite flat over there so not the biggest issue honestly. As soon as you touch the tiles in front of our building, you have a few spots that seem slippery for some unknown reason. We all had several moments where we slipped and could luckily grab the other person to not fall. This is not ideal, especially not when you know the steepness of the hill we live on. There are just a few parts where it's a temporary flat part to walk on (these moments are instantly relaxing to the legs when going uphill, let me tell you!) but mostly, we have a very rough declining hill to walk down to the main road and supermarkets. I have not managed to see if I can figure out how steep exactly, as I'm honestly curious!

A few slippery slides almost went wrong

Besides the regular slippery parts where it's just the main sidewalk to deal with, we also have the parts where there's a garden/garage entrance of the house you're passing, this is of course built in a way that it matches the level they used for their garden/garage. This means that often you will find an unexpected sidewalk doing down 20/25 cm which is dangerous if you haven't noticed it in time. I personally had a few slides where I could barely keep myself up and still had a little heart attack minutes later from the shock of almost falling. I can't forget the fact that the private health insurance excluded 1 of my knees due to surgery (a minor one) I had as a teen! If anything were to go wrong with that knee, it means I need to go public, which I will try to avoid as much as possible. And then we have the lower back injury that I had during our previous stay in Spain, which was also thanks to a slide from stairs, with the exact same tiles btw! The long-lasting pains and meds I needed for about 9 months after it happened are still fresh in my memory!

It won't keep me from going out though

I have accepted the fact that we live uphill, it will be challenging until we have a car at least, but there are far worse things in life. At least we have a roof over our head, we like our home, and we also like the area even though we would have loved to explore it a bit more, it will have to wait until we have a car. We learned that walking downhill for 30 minutes with this steepness is perfectly ok, just a bit dangerous at some parts, which we probably recognize by now. Going back home though is not just a bit more challenging but often (depending on the humidity and heat) at least twice as heavy as walking down. The good thing about all of this is, that we are so much more active than in Budapest, where the walks in the area were just not worth it at all, and mostly inhaling fumes. Even though the sky here is not that clear (yet) it's still a whole lot better than where we came from and it has gotten us to walk a lot more which is better for our health.

Some pictures of the harbor and beach

We tried capturing the steepness of the hill many times, yet it's very hard to show how it is in a picture. The first picture I shared is showing the final part down when we're almost walking down the boulevard. This is not the worst part, not even close! But it gives you an idea. I'm always very happy when we arrive at the boulevard as this means we're getting close to the harbor as well as the nice view of people just gathering their stuff or enjoying an evening ball game on the beach. Spanish people love to gather in the evening and this is actually when you want to be out there, I don't care much about the afternoon part, it's often quiet and too hot (during these months at least) so the evenings are when we enjoy the best times so far. There's something 'zen" about harbors, I've always enjoyed walking there during my holidays as well, it always gave me a holiday feeling too, and now, I could enjoy this every single day if I wanted to. But we're trying to avoid walking there daily because it's much nicer when this doesn't become too normal so it feels like a night out.

I hope you enjoyed the pictures and wishing you a great day!

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