We had a pretty good swell this week, meaning the waves were between 4 and 6 feet high here at the Playa de Berria. For us, this is where the fun starts, so we decided to make the most of it and have surfing classes on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. We can highly recommend the Berria Surf School here. The kids were in their own group with other kids. Since our kids don’t speak any Spanish one of the teachers always translated it for them! The teachers really did a great job with the kids, teaching them playfully how to stand up on the board while pushing them into the white water. The two of us shared a teacher with one other adult, so we could focus on improving our surfing while the kids had fun and were looked after – win win. On Tuesday the swell made it even harder to get through the whitewater past the breaking zone. The current was also pretty strong and the waves rolling in from the ocean every other second cost us more energy than the actual surfing. Nate had so much fun on Wednesday in his class that he didn’t want to leave the water – so we had a quick lunch and went back to beach, this time with our own boards. Good thing we brought them. Just the wetsuits we had bought for the boys were a little to thin – for us the 3/2mm ones are plenty warm, but apparently our kids like it warmer. So we drove to the nearest Decathlon and got a 4/3mm one for Nate and an additional 2mm suit for Noam as they don’t carry 4/3mm wetsuits for kids his age. From now on he wears two suits on top of each other. Now they’re both warm 🙂
As the swell subsided towards the second half of the week we decided to take a little break from surfing. Looking at the forecast we could already see a new one arriving early next week, which meant we had a few days to get to know the land better too, not just the water 🙂 Both the kids and us were happy for this break – surfing is a tough full body workout and we need a few days to regenerate. On Thursday we visited the safari park “Parque de la naturaleza de Cabárceno” which is just half an hour away. Until the 1980s they used to mine iron ore there, once they closed the mine they repurposed the area after some discussion (first it was planned to use it as a landfill) to the safari park. The entrance fee is quite steep, but it is indeed worth it. You can discover the park not just by foot or car – you can also ride two rope ways (one is not just going up and down, but also in a triangle) so you can watch the animals from above. One of the rope way cabins even has a glass floor so you can see even more of the beautiful landscape and the animals in it. There are lots of parking areas in the park so you can stop and take a closer look at the animals if you want to. The whole park is built beautifully with lots of space for the animals in their enclosures. That made us happy, as we feel that zoos sometimes cannot provided adequate space for animals.
