Our Monday drive

The name of the town we checked out today was Javea.  On our way up, we passed a horse center, which Guillermo always likes to stop at because he is trying to find someone who might know of horse-hair hitching here in Spain.  His brother Alfred does horse-hair hitching and his work is top-notch.  Alfred heard that horse-hair hitching got its start in Spain, but so far, Guillermo has been unable to find anyone who knows how to do the hitching the way Alfred does and we have not been able to find any products anywhere that even come CLOSE to the quality that Alfred does.  So, after visiting that horse center which was on the outskirts of Gata de Gorgos, we drove on over to Javea where we had lunch.  We had noted several decent restaurants to look for before we came but found that one was closed and couldn't find any of the others that we were interested in.  (We forgot to take the GPS).  So we ended up at the restaurant that was on the bottom of our list, and it was a "bottom of the list" experience.  The food was nothing special at all.
Javea was a nice town and it had a very imposing mountain to the north of it.  Here is the view of the beach in Javea.  There were actually two beaches here - one rocky and gravely and the other with sand.  The sandy beach was small compared to other beaches.

Then we drove to another horse center in Verger which apparently was run by German-speaking people, but they seemed to be totally uninterested in what Guillermo had to say.  We passed another place on our way back home and those people were extremely interested and took our phone number and said they would make some calls and see what they could tell us.

So, Javea is about as far north as we're going to visit this time around.  Last time (in 2012), we went as far as Valencia and that was very interesting but we've been there already and want to see things we've not seen yet.

Guillermo and I have decided, after visiting so many beach towns along this Costa Blanca - that the best beaches are in Calpe and in San Juan, which is the long long beach by El Campello.