Soller Train Trip!

Sunday, 11 March 2012 - Palma de Mallorca, Spain

The tours offered by the ship have names for example like, "A Stroll in Dalt Vila" or "Biking on Formentera", meaning a ridiculously easy walking tour or a ridiculously easy guided bicycle tour, respectively. When the tour operator doesn't know what to say about an overpriced all day visit to a nearby city (with a very expensive lunch included), they just put an explanation mark at the end of the name of the city, for example, "Seville!". This is a put off for me since I think of real estate agents who advertise houses with small bathrooms and peeling paint with descriptions like, "Views!". To me except for the International standard symbol for "Warning" which is "!", I would like to reserve the exclamation mark only for something that is so good that you don't want to try to add anything better than the name. In other words, I'd not use the exclamation mark for most, even pretty good, tours.

Majorca is a vacation island well known to everyone and pretentiously bragged about by those Europeans on the ship who "have a place in Majorca". The ship spells the Balearic Islands' biggest island with the double "L". So I am using both spellings to show my je ne sais quoi. But I digress.

I've been to, Palma, the major (mallor?) city on the island twice before as port calls. The first time in early 2002 I took an all day tour, oddly enough called, "Valdemossa and Chopin". It was a long full day tour I remember with a short train ride in the rain, a visit to a monastery (which I don't recall), and a long visit to a house in a beautiful village where a 21 year old Chopin was the boy-toy of a middle aged woman oddly enough going under the name of George.

The second visit was limited to a very rainy Palma where I met a couple who couldn't tell me the name of the Crystal Cruises ship they were traveling on. This is reported on in a blog from a few years ago.

This port call to Palma was very different. Barbara, I, and friend Bruce ventured out at 8 am and took a taxi to the very historic Stoller train station. This train—the one I must have ridden in the fog years ago—has been operating daily without interruption since 1912. We found the schedules we had obtained earlier to be wrong (as usual, hey it was on the Internet), but there was a departure and return journey that would allow for us to take the train both ways in spectacularly sunny weather and even catch the continuation of the rail line all the way to the sea via an equally beautiful tram train. The trolley must be older than the town of Soller since it goes right through the middle of the equally beautiful sideway cafes. We were successful in all counts, including having a nice lunch only interrupted by an occasional trolley car, finding the first class parlor car on the train was available without surcharge, and returned to the ship via a nice walk through the sleepy town of Palma since it was both Sunday and siesta time, two things taken very seriously in Spain.

So today's self made tour was Soller Train Trip!

Tomorrow, will be on our own in Barcelona. Will report when I'm back in Boulder.