Girona, North East Spain

The road that carries us, my family and me, that carries our bags and packs, our bagpipes and handbags, it is a road I know well. Through the window is Catalonia, the landscape at once comfortingly familiar and worryingly foreign.
The road flashing by prompts familiar images, snippets of scenery appearing like flashcards shown to me from above, there and gone within seconds.

We are on holiday, the flights made and baggage collected, the taxi given directions. Now comes the hour-long drive to Cadaques, the extracurricular pilgrimage of my life. Nearly every year we take this drive over the mountains to my holiday home in Cadaques. Travelling from either Barcelona or Girona, the road changes only slightly with each coming visit and thus the scenery is as familiar as the rolling hills and grey mountains of rural Aberdeenshire.

A recognizable grove of poplars appearing on our left makes me smile and yet my family do not notice them. Perhaps it is just I who know the stately trees, the same ones we have seen with every trip we make to Spain. I look through the grove as we speed past, their planted rows and lines so formal, resembling soldiers on parade much more than mere foliage.

The field of drooping sunflowers appear soon after, their heads sunk as if disgusted by the weather, their trunks mottled from pesticide use. Now dying in the heat they are abandoned, no farmers walking slowly among them or tractors riding over them, the wilted plants adding stillness to the land. The fields of cane are soon to follow yet I barely notice them for I am waiting for the Concrete building that is the lair of King Kong.

And there he is, the mountains looming behind his fibreglass bulk, his face set in a primeval glair. How strange really, that here in rural Spain lies a factory making fairground attractions, its grassy yard home to brightly painted dragons and guerrillas, each a slide or roller coaster carriage. King Kong of the Amusement Parks gives me a final look of fury and then we are gone, past the mini golf and into the hills towards Cadaques.