If there ever was a competition as to how much you can fit into a day, I think we won today.

We began the day with a bit of exercise. Up early, Courtney and I went for a ride along the famous Costa Brava coast road, from Tossa de Mar up to Sant Feliu de Guixols, a 40km return trip, with over 700m of climbing, up and down and around and around some of the most spectacular coastal scenery imaginable and overlooking the emerald expanse of the Mediterranean Ocean.

To ice the cake completely, there was not a breath of wind, the temperature was around 21deg and the bluest of blue skies provided the ceiling to our amphitheatre.

Meanwhile Wendy was out running, and Mitchell, well Mitchell was having a sleep in.

After a cool off and preparation for the day ahead, we loaded in to our hired Fiat Diablo, not the most classic Italian car ever invented, but practical nonetheless, and headed north to Figueres, the home of the Salvador Dali Theatre-Museum, the Dali Jewels, his workshop as well as his former house and the chapel where he was baptised.

The drive took us a good hour or so after which we found somewhere not too expensive to park (at 4 Euro cents per minute) and joined a queue which by European museum standards was tiny, certainly compared with anything we experienced in Italy in 2015.

We were entertained in the queue watching an old, seemingly homeless man singing a song about the moon in Spanish while addressing the song to anyone in the line prepared to make eye contact with him, occasionally abusing a local restauranteur who had politely asked him to keep the noise down.

We eventually entered the weird and wonderful world of Salvador Dali, the Spanish artist 1904 - 1989, famous for his surrealist creations.

We spent a good couple of hours wandering the various rooms of the museum, the largest surrealistic object in the world, occupying the former Municipal Theatre, which was destroyed at the end of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930's. On its ruins Dali created his own museum, paying respect to the town where he was born and where he exhibited his first works.

After leaving the Dali Museum, we had a quick sit down at one of the local cafés, more to relieve our tired legs than for anything else, before jumping back into the car and heading to the ancient villages of Peratallada, Pals and finally Sa Riera.

Each had its own unique feel to it but in each case the unmistakeable charm of a medieval village with its narrow, paved streets, the arched podiums with accommodation built above, the soft lighting that comes from a combination of filtered, indirect sunshine and the warm glow of the natural stone cladding and paving.

By the end of the third visit, we were exhausted. The day was hot and we'd been on our feet for most of the day. A swim was in order and by this time it was nearly 6pm. We headed to a beach in Sa Punta and enjoyed a good hour of swimming and lazing on the still crowded beach. As always the water was super refreshing and as buoyant as ever.

By this stage dinner was well and truly overdue. After a tip off from Dave, one of the guides from last week, we decided to head to a restaurant called La Gola in Torroella de Montgri for supposedly the best paella in Spain. Big call!

Dave had warned us that it might be a bit hard to find, and also that it might not look too much like a restaurant. He was right. Our satnav certainly struggled with the location. We eventually found the restaurant down several, potted, dirt roads in the middle of an apple orchard. It was an outdoor venue that looked to be part of a youth hostel. Our first impressions weren't great when we arrived and noticed that the only car within the car park was a BMW X5 with only 3 wheels, supported by what looked like a big rock.

Wendy made the first approach while the rest of us remained in the car, feeling decidedly unsure about the whole thing.

Soon enough though, a lady emerged and through broken Spanglish, the two were able to negotiate a table for 4 in what was basically a deserted undercover eating area, with old tables and chairs and shabby table cloths.

Arriving slightly before 7.30pm, the lady refused to take any orders until after 7.30pm, which gave us extra time to sit there and wonder what the hell Dave had got us into.

Eventually a waiter made his way over to our table, and with exceptional English took our orders. By this time other guests were arriving and we were feeling a lot more comfortable about the whole encounter.

Our food arrived fairly swiftly thereafter, and as predicted by Dave, it was exceptional.

We chowed down the fried squid in no time, with Mitchell so impressed he decided to order it as a main course as well. Given Dave's predictions, Wendy, Courtney and I couldn't say no to the paella, and it didn't let us down. I'd tried paella a few other times since we'd been in Spain, and each time it seemed overly salty, gluggy and lacking much else than rice. This paella was lighter and certainly not gluggy. It had a good amount of seafood - prawns, baby crabs and other assorted shellfish and had a bit less salt than what we'd become accustomed to. Interestingly, no paella we've had so far in Spain has had chorizo as an ingredient.

We cleaned up the rest of the paella pan and paid the bill. I think we were hoping that being in the middle of nowhere the price might be less than some of the more touristy seaside restaurants we'd been eating at, but it was not to be, the going rate for a person sharing a paella dish being about 14 Euros each whether you are in bustling Tossa De Mar or quiet little Torroella de Montrgi.

With an hour's drive to get home, we were eventually back in the apartment by around 10pm. A massive day with a bit of everything - bike riding and running, museum, three ancient villages, a swim in the Mediterranean, and dinner at a youth hostel in the middle of nowhere.