El Puerto de Santa Maria

After a big shopping spree in Marbella, primarily for new cameras, tennis rackets, food and supplies, we headed west towards Cadiz and the Sherry Triangle. ( Marbella has a huge shopping center that caters to the English visitors, so we knew we could get lots of the supplies we needed including the Canon brand that DaVinci was set on and things like my goats milk and yogurt. This is not our usual kind of place, but sometimes it comes in handy even for non-shopping types like us.) We were still not in a city mood, so opted to try out the El Puerto de Santa Maria area, which is a coastal sherry and resort town between Cadiz and Jerez. We got a kick out of the bull display in this area that also had the symbol for sherry next to it.

There is a large campground there located across the street from Puntilla beach called Camping Playa  Las Dunas  that we enjoyed, particularly for the long boardwalk along the beach which was great for family bike riding. We love sampling all the interesting playground equipment in Europe and this one had some cool things that Mozart enjoyed, including one shaped like a ship.

We were off by ourselves in an area with lots of trees which was a very different environment than the large sandy beach or the nearby town which looks a little bit like Jerez to us. Mozart could ride her bike all around by herself amongst the pine trees without us having to keep a close eye on her, pick wild flowers to her hearts content and run around and explore nature. She found a really cool bug here which is always fun.We are guessing that it was an Elephant Stag Beetle. What do you think?

We were getting into a groove of having our breakfast outside with fresh picked wild flowers, getting our homeschool done and having lots of time for play and exploring. It is just a short ferry ride to Cadiz, so we considered it seriously, but decided we preferred hanging at the beach, in nature  and biking instead. If we had stayed longer we would have gone, but we have lots of territory to cover and this was just meant to be a short stop, so we will have to catch Cadiz  another time. We really want to see it, but timing has to be right. We will probably be mostly in the relax beach-y mode until we get to Evora and Lisbon areas. This is a family vacation rode trip after all, first and foremost!