Euro Spring 2015 - Part 20 - This Time It Is About the M's

Where Our Heroes

• Face the vengeance of the Slightly Powerful, Phoenix Kitty God of Maltese Public Transportation
• Find a friend and cake decorator
• Put put their feet to good use
• Find the joy of the less travel 
• And again thank TripAdvisor for directions and sustinence

Today we decided to do something very different.  Wife had researched a number of walks in towns and country.  We decided to do one that took us between the two southern towns of Marsaskala and Marsaxlokk.  We really had a fabulous day with the one exception that the Slightly Powerful, Phoenix, Kitty God of Maltese Public Transportation had it totally in for us today.  We had huge long waits for buses and on our last trip had another standing room only trip when we were really tired.  Other than that though it was a great day.

This morning I caught the sun rising over the sea

Our bus (once if finally came) dropped us off exactly at our starting point at the parish church of Marsaskala

We needed a potty break and it had taken so long to get to where we were to start that a bit of coffee sounded good too.  We ended up meeting the lovely hostess of this little cafe, Frankie's.  One of the owners was decorating a cake with such care that I asked if I could take a picture.

She's very new media savvy and asked if we could connect on Facebook.  Normally I only do friends and family only on Facebook but I decided to connect with her and then put this picture up.

Then it was on around the harbor and shoreline of Marsaskala.  This is the less well known of the two towns - a very mellow place.

It of course had its own set of quirky signs

For God's sake would you PLEASE Ghall your Tieghek Naddaf!

And just put a stick in your bike will you.

And don't you dare run over any of our beloved hedgehogs

Along the coast there were substantial areas of salt pans used for producing sea salt - some still in use.

It's Malta.  There has to be a 16th century guard tower right?

These are working areas too as these petroleum pipelines being assembled for the tanker servicing business showed.

Then it was on the trail between the two towns

We passed through a number of fields with glorious colors one of which had a woman painting sitting in the middle of a field.

As I said before, this is a working area.  This is a fish farming operation.

Once we reached the high point of the walk, we saw a number of great vistas

Inspired by Wife I tried for some 'art' shots using a fence as my foreground

You could see the two towns 

This section reminded us of New Mexico.  It's just as arid here as at home.

There was one gigantic ass container center in Marsaxlokk

We met and talked to a number of couples, two from Great Britain and one from France who were doing the same walk.

TripAdvisor again got us to a great restaurant, Restaurant Tartarun.

It's a somewhat upscale place (by the standards we've seen) and we felt a little awkward as we were kind of hot, sweaty and smelly from our walk.  But they were very gracious and we had a great meal.  I mean, when you ask what the fish of the day is and they have you go up to a counter and actually pick out the fish you want, you're not going to have the fish much fresher than that.

We started with a little fish beignet that had a little curry in it with a yogurt and cucumber sauce - very Turkish like.

In keeping with our new vow on wine, we chose a Gavi, a white from the Piedmonte area of Italy.

Wife had a red snapper that our waitress boned for her after it had been grilled.  Very nicely done.

I decided to try a barracuda because I'd never had it before.  It was flavored with a little garlic oil and had just a few acidic condiments - caper berries, sun dried tomatoes, and fresh tomato that were a perfect counterbalance to the slightly strong fish.

It was a pretty plate too.

We didn't do too much after lunch other than wait for our bus.  The town of Marsaxlokk is the opposite of Masaskala in that it is total tourist.  All the cruise and other buses were there and the associated vendors.  It is odd that this is a working fishing and shipping town as well.