The case of the missing key - May 28, 2025

SUMMARY Spent the morning in the very pretty Botanical Garden in Gigón. Struggled to find some place open for lunch at 12:30/1:00 - they definitely keep different hours here. Long walk to the not too pretty Old Town then struggled to find some place open for dinner at 7:30. Plenty of bars open and if we’d wanted potato chips or olives for dinner we’d have been fine. Ended up at a small grocery store for some picnic food and had it in one of the nice seating areas at our parador. - Karen

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DETAIL We hang out in our room til almost 10 am. Then there’s a confab  with Ron and Nancy about what to do today and in the coming days. We eventually do head out, so I leave our keys at the front desk. Trying to practice my Spanish I say “Hasta la vista”. The lady behind the counter, knowing we’ll see each other again today, corrects me: “Hasta tarde!”. I agree and add “Hasta Pronto” just for good measure. We all laugh.

Our immediate plan is to tour the botanical garden which is like a 42 minute walk from our hotel. Being so far we’re leaning towards catching a bus instead when we remember we have a rental car. How do you spell “duh”? The four of us drive over to the Botanical Garden. It’s 1.60€ for each of me and Karen (since we’re over 65). Ron and Nancy are soaked for more like 2.75€. Still not bad!

It’s an awesome botanical garden. Very well laid out and labeled. It’s obviously been here a long time. It’s huge with lots of shade and water, both pools and waterfalls. Visually and acoustically appealing. We approve.

Mike and Liz want the exercise, so they do the long walk over and meet us. We do more touring around. Eventually we’re getting hungry so the four of us drive to lunch. We’re aiming for a pizza place across town named “D’Aldo” (in honor of my older brother). Trip Advisor says it opens at noon, but we’re there at 1:40 and it’s still not open. “Twenty minutes” we’re told. That’s too long as we haven’t eaten anything all day. We’re quite hungry. We walk to another place (that we passed walking from where we parked). It’s good but some odd ingredients. Ceasar salad with pineapple and curly q pasta. It does come with Ceasar dressing, but it’s a tad sweet. We’re not in Italy, we figure. They also give us little pre-packaged “emergency kits” for salads. It’s a small cellophane sack and inside is one small package of oil, one of vinegar, and one of salt. Open in case of emergency. Into the purse they go for future picnics.

We drive back to the hotel and ask for our key at the front desk. Nope, they don’t have it. Are we sure WE don’t have it? Have we checked our pockets? Maybe in the room? In the car? Everybody checks and it can’t be found. I remind the lady of our conversation earlier, “Hasta la vista”, and all that. She remembers. Yes, we did leave our key! They give me a backup key (with no hotel identification).

“Chilling” in our room (it’s not all that cool) the A/C guy comes by. He presses some of the same buttons I pressed. I could only ever get “Off” or “Stb” (standby). This guy could get “On” which seems to work (for a while). Air is coming out, finally. Fixed?

After a while the front desk lady knocks on the door. They found the key. Someone put the key in the ‘random keys’ basket. Our key, and all the room keys, have a big (4” across) oval metal tag, maybe 3/8” thick. Heavy and hard to misplace.

We do more planning in the room, Karen, Nancy, and Ron mapping out our coming days here in Asturias.

A bit after 5 o’clock pm, five of us (Nancy’s opting to relax in their room) head back out for a walk, to finally see the city proper. The problem with this plan is that most all dinner places don’t open for dinner (or any non-chip/olive food) until 8:30. Are we really up for three and a half hours of walking before we eat? We’ll see.

We walk the entire length of the city’s beach seawall. It’s long. There are still lots of people sunning on the beach, many of the (older) women topless on their backs. Avert your gaze.

After an hour of walking we’re ready to eat. Surely someplace decent is open earlier than 8:30 (in another two and a half hours). Spoiler alert: Nope!

We pop into a French chain grocery store and buy some crackers and stuff and walk home to make dinner of that and our leftovers.

More planning over dinner. As we eat and drink around the card table in the sitting room, one couple after another, guests in the hotel, are headed out for dinner (at the proper hour!) These Americans, they’re like animals.

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Photos

We wake and open the windows to cool down the room. Outside, over in the park, is an apparent nesting spot for white haron or cranes. They're a ton of them and they're always there, squaking and being social.

Mid-morning Ron and Nancy come over and have a con-fab with Karen on where we should go, and what we should see, in the coming days (now that we're actually in Asturias).

At the botanical garden we loved the many ponds and waterfalls.

Karen especially loved the micro strawberries. She was tempted to sample one, but be left them for future visitors to also enjoy. There were also lots of blackberries and blueberries.

The botanical gardens must have been here a while, as some of the trees are really tall.

In the Food Factory portion of the gardens the areas are divided up by walls made of piled stacks of 'schist' rock, cut to look like dimensional lumber. Very cool.

We finally had lunch close to 2pm. We got some vegetables, finally, in the form of salads. They did have some strange ingredients in their "Caesar salad" like pineapple and pasta spirals. Not bad.

Walking back to our car we got to see the marina. Water's big here, like everywhere on the coast.

Back at our room it had warmed up, so we opened the windows and door. We get great cross ventilation.

At 5:30 we head out to explore the town (read: beach) and hopefully, eventually find some dinner.

At the other end of the long (long) beach is Old Town. What does it have as it's attraction and claim to fame? It's old. That's about it.

This is as close as we got to an eating place that's open and is serving food at 7 pm. It was open, but no food til 8:30 or later. That's how pretty much all restaurants in town (in the state?) do things.

We ended up having dinner at a table at the end of the hall in our hotel. A picnic. Not totally healthy, but tasty and fresh (mostly). And a good price performer. What do we need? Less wine, alcohol and food (at some point).

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