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Published: February 2nd 2015
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This month in Spain has been about food – tapas in all its shapes and forms, from simple marinated anchovies to skyscraper stacks of tasty morsels, to paella and arroz negre (a black rice risotto with seafood), to chorizo in cider and eggplant chips. Sundays in any town in Spain are the best time to go out for food as you just follow the locals to whichever bar happens to be heaving with people and your sure to find some pretty good tapas. Another highlight was revisiting the Sierra de Bernia which we walked two years ago and where we had roasted rabbit with garlic on the terrace looking out to the coast. Sometimes you think you cannot possibly repeat such a good thing but we did. The same ladies were there serving, the husband was cooking out the back on his barbecue and we enjoyed the exact same meal and stayed the night in the car park with the view to die for (the quietest night of the whole trip so far).
Two wonderful experiences involving food. happened in Gandia. We took a bike ride into town looking for Sunday lunch and found the market square heaving with cafes
spilling out over the sidewalks and a massed band playing in the centre with the most enthusiastic and energetic conductor we have ever seen. Whilst enjoying this over tapas and a boutique beer we observed a local act of compassion and generosity. A beggar woman with a baby was working her way around the bar and getting the usual cold shoulder when a well dressed woman tapped her on the shoulder and invited her to select any food she wanted from the counter. You know someone is seriously in need when they spend a good half hour selecting food, eating it and then stowing it away for later.
After getting the clutch replaced before xmas we thought that was the end of our bad luck with Izzy but not so. We acquired a bit of a vibration not long after that work was done and Brian suspected the wheels were out of balance. We also decided to put a couple of new tyres on the front and when the garage looked to do this they also said our brake pads needed replacing – so a few days and 300 euro later we were back on the road and vibration
free!
The growth in dedicated “camper parks” has been a delight during this sojourn in Spain. They have sprung up everywhere and offer great value for motorhomers who don’t want to stay in full on caravan parks and resorts. The standard formula is a flat gravel area divided into pitches, a drive over service point for emptying waste and getting fresh water. Often they have a shower and toilet, a washing machine and best of all good quality, mostly free wifi. Some are in great locations for walking and cycling, others are near the built up beachfronts (we tend to avoid these) but all seem to have appeared since we were last here. The average price is around 10 euro a night and they are being run by enthusiastic, friendly locals.
So far on this trip we have clung to the Spanish coast with only short journeys to low lying hills inland which have provided us with plenty of walking opportunities. Geocaching has enabled us to find many good circuits through interesting scenery dotted with numerous caches. One particularly good walk was from Los Lobos just inland from Aguilas. The walk took us up through ancient and extensive
mine workings to a ridge where we lunched with fine views of the coast and the inland away below us. Along the way we found 16 caches all with varying degrees of difficulty which can be a challenge when the hints are in Spanish or you are staring at a long, crumbling wall with a hint that says “behind the stone”. Another useful web site for finding walks has been Wikiloc. It is a site where people post information about walks with details of length, height gain, difficulty etc. and they all come up on google maps. Between these two resources we haven’t bought a paper map for months, we just upload things to the GPS and away we go.
This month we booked our flights to return home to Australia on the 29 June which gives us only 4 more months of touring before we return to England to organise the shipping of our motorhome, sort out our gear and visit all our friends and relatives one more time before departing. After just over 3 years of touring we are ready to call it quits in Europe as there are other things to do, places to be and
people to see.
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