Blogs from Valencian Community, Spain, Europe

The week before our planned 4 weeks of travel around Spain with a two-week extension to fit in Vienna and Budapest, lots of work was done on the boat. On Monday afternoon we were able to pick up the stainless-steel support that we took to the local boatyard to have welded. The welding job was an excellent one – they definitely have quite the craftsperson at Ascar Boatyard. Now the work had to be done to put all the 7 wires that were pulled out of it last week, back in! Trying to squeeze the wires in, especially with some of them having quite a large diameter and even larger fittings on the end, was a job but with the help of our “snake” and a little dish-soap to make the wire slippery, that part of ... read more

In our previous travels people we have met from Holland, have been good fun. They certainly travel more than many other Europeans we’ve met. Our next 2 campsites we visited were run by Dutch owners, they were to play a part in our long drive up Spain’s Mediterranean coast. Having abandoned Plan A visiting Cordoba, Granada and increasingly the likelihood that Barcelona would go the same way because of the heat. Enter Plan B, to travel and camp near the coast picking up, hopefully, more of the cool sea breeze. Our first hoped stop was Marbella, the holiday destination for the super-rich. I phoned the only campsite in the area know to us -no room. We then drive through hoping to park up, but every available inch of parking was used up. Driving further up the ... read more

Well, today we are moving on from Valencia to Alicante. We had bought the tickets for the train last night, but still we weren't sure of everything. We'd had the hotel order a taxi at 12:10, but we were up and ready to go by 10am or so, so we walked to the shopping center just up the street from our hotel. After browsing around, we returned to the hotel, finished packing our stuff and went downstairs to turn in the key card. The taxi showed up right on time and took us to the Alfafar station, where we bought 2 more tickets to Estacion del Norte. We were there quite early, so after confirming that our tickets to Alicante were valid, we looked for a place to eat lunch and relax. We ended up eating ... read more

We were pretty tired when we went to bed, so we didn't get up until 8am. There was nothing planned for today except a foot tour of Valencia... and I mean foot! We walked to Alfafar train station and caught the train to Valencia Estacion Norte. We still had a few trips paid for with our metro ticket we'd bought at the Valencia Airport. Manoli bought an 8-trip ticket that would serve for both of us to take the Metro or Train 4 times. It worked fine, except the first person thru the gate had to pass the ticket off to the other. Oh well, it was a lot cheaper than individual one-trip tickets. We arrived just a little before 10am and started checking out the Plaza Ajuntimiento sights. First, we visited the museum inside the ... read more

It’s our last full day with access to a washing machine for at least a week so we decide to make use of it while we still can. As I think I might have mentioned previously the washing machine is in a cupboard on the very much smaller of our two balconies, as is the fold out contraption that we need to hang the clothes on to dry. We quickly discover that if we try to fold out the contraption before we do the washing, we can’t get past it to get to the cupboard where the washing machine is …. unless we only half fold out the contraption….. and also bring the fold out ironing board inside so that it doesn’t get in the way too…. And then there’s the pegs issue. We’ve noticed that ... read more