Andalucia(Ernesto Lecuona)-East again,this time to Andalucia,Spain 21st April 2016

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We are leaving Portugal today after 2 ½ weeks travelling from the very north of the country to the very south.

It would be wrong for us to say that our time here was awful simply because we had the ‘Spanish Flu’ for a good part of the time we have spent in the country.

However the scenery we passed wasn’t quite as we expected and although the beaches were in the main open and clean generally we were a bit disappointed with the country as a whole.

The people however have been very pleasant and have always been welcoming and helpful. And the internet worked extremely well in all the places we stayed and in fact faster than we experience at home if uploading speed of our HD video is anything to go by.

Such has been the hospitality of the Portuguese that we experienced it again as we took the cases etc to the car. The guy who had been maintaining the shower at the pool insisted on taking Gretchen’s suitcase to the car for her. What a gentleman!

We are heading today to a small town about 10km west of Seville which will suit us as we prefer to avoid staying in cities if we can.

Staying off the toll road, the E01, Gina had us wandering along the N125 which was probably the main road many years ago but was now under a lot of reconstruction slowing our progress a bit.

Eventually as lunchtime approached we neared the border with Spain but before crossing took a detour down to the beach for one last look at Portugal’s seaside, not that it was probably going to change too much simply because we crossed into Spain.

The town we reached at the beach was another one of those towns awaiting the summer influx although here there were a small number of people around already including a couple around our age who had hired bikes and were blissfully cycling down the middle of the road two abreast not realising that we were behind them.

They carried onto the walkway to the beach and we went into the car park to have a boot lunch.

No sooner had we started to get lunch ready when we heard a French voice rattle off a couple of sentences, none of which we could understand.

It was the old story; he had spotted our French number plate and thought he was talking to his countrymen/women.

Once he realised that we weren’t able to understand him he recognised that we were speaking English and changed his language to converse.

He was an interesting bloke who had just come over from spending time in Morocco and wondered whether we were going there. We said we would like to but not on this occasion.

He kept talking to us while we had our bread rolls and fruit and actually at one point we didn’t think he was ever going to go.

Finally we said we were on our way into Spain and had to hit the road and that bought the conversation to an end.

He had seemed honest enough but you never know and we think we had told him all he needed to know about us.

In the end we didn’t actually get to eat our sweet treats we had bought for lunch because we wanted to bring the conversation to an end.

Initially when we got back on the road Gina was taking us to where there was a ferry crossing of the river that forms the border of Portugal and Spain so we had to change roads to get onto the A22 and cross into Spain over another of those fancy cable stayed bridges that we have seen and driven over regularly.

The A22 became the A49 once we were into Spain and although it was a highway with cruising speed of 120kph which we would normally avoid for a more local road we decided to carry on and get to our destination sooner.

Also of course we had had to put our clocks on 1 hour after we entered Spain as we were back to this crazy time zone thing that has Spain out of sync with the rest of Europe that she should be part of.

Alongside the highway were orchards and although there were no roads leading to them the orchards were all surrounded by hire wire fences, some with barbed wire. At €0.50 per kilo you would have to wonder about the need for such security of the orange crop!

Also in the fields that the highway was passing were long plastic tunnel houses all growing strawberries and it is now clear as to why they are so cheap in this part of the world.

We would have to say that what we saw in Portugal that Spain appears to be more productive in the use of its land.

Petrol is cheaper in Spain then Portugal and so we had avoided filling up until the other side of the border at €0.30 per litre cheaper!

Towns sped by off the highway and soon we were exiting to arrive at the gated community where the Air BnB apartment was.

We had a bit of a mix up with Maria our host at her apartment in the gated community.

Getting in wasn’t a problem as she had apparently alerted the man on the gate and he waved us through and we found the street number easily enough?

However when I made the phone call to say we were there because there was no way we could attract her attention because of a wall around the block of land and no bell, somehow things got lost in translation as she didn’t appear as we expected.

So we waited.....and waited.....and waited. Thirty minutes or so went past and we began to wonder if she was coming from elsewhere to let us in.

So another phone call and this time she emerged from behind a large black gate.

She hadn’t been sure where we had called from and had not realised that we were out on the street right at the apartment! She also showed us the bell we could have rung that we had seen but thought was a light of some kind.

All finished well in the end and she showed us around the very neat apartment with its bedroom upstairs. All quite spacious and will suit us well for the next 3 nights. There is even a swimming pool although it looked like the cleaning of it had slipped and anyway the daytime temperatures haven’t risen to such a point where we might get into some water other than the shower.

We needed a supermarket and first option was Lidl, not a store we usually favour as the goods they have are a bit of a hotch potch although their prices are usually very good because they seem to buy in bulk and the prices reflect that.

The other thing we are not keen on using Lidl is that they don’t or at least they never used to take a card that was designated a credit card even though ours is preloaded and is essentially a debit card. So we went prepared to pay by cash. Restocked and enough ice cream to last the three nights we were back in business.

With the weather now more predictable, or so it seems, it might be time to catch up on washing clothes tomorrow before an afternoon jaunt to a very old Roman town nearby.

PS.the playing of the song on YouTube is not very inspiring but the guitar sound is what Andalucia is all about as far as music goes.So give the video a go but just listen.

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