Benidorm Series Theme Song -Our Trek North Continues to Pucol - 5th May 2016

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It has been a good stay in ‘the cave ‘and it wasn’t really as bad as some of the reviewers on booking.com made out.

We are going to continue the trend of not staying in the big cities and this time actually head past Valencia for Pucol.

We continued up the N332 which is the road that bought us into Torrevieja and this road should take us all the way to the outskirts of Valencia at least.

After we cleared the built up area the surrounding land was quite rural and with a good number of trucks in both directions there were a number of ‘girls’ on the side of the road waiting for some business to come along from a truck driver. We have never actually seen any of them do business but who knows what we might see today! Most of them had their own chairs and were usually seated close to the highway, at the end of a driveway, which led back to a property, often a citrus orchard.

Thankfully the N332 took us on a bypass that meant we missed the city of Alicante which didn’t look that interesting and we are confident that we didn’t miss anything by not going into the city.

We had toyed with the idea of staying in Benidorm which was the next major city on our route but upon seeing the mass of high rises we were glad we didn’t.

Benidorm has been one of those places we at least wanted to go and have a look at after the reality TV series based upon Brits on holiday took our interest.

We found a free car park just above the beach and although it meant a steep walk down to the seaside it was better than trying to negotiate the one way street on the seafront.

What we found was an exquisitely groomed beach which had a gentle curve and fitted neatly between two headlands. Almost perfect, except there was almost no one on it.

Well the weather wasn’t that great and the temperature hardly warmer enough to venture into the water.

We had expected to find a line of cafes all advertising ‘Full English Breakfast ‘but perhaps we didn’t walk far enough along the seafront because we only found cafes offering Spanish fare. Even the holidaymakers were speaking Spanish so it seemed like any Brits here on holiday weren’t in the area where we were or thought there was no point in being down at the seaside given the overcast sky.

There had certainly been a lot of investment here and they have packed in as many high rises as possible and there must be thousands of rooms and beds available for those who come here on package holidays.

One of the high rises which looked to be a recent construction, looked like something out of ‘Gotham City’ and was really out of touch with the other styles. Although in saying that at least someone had had a go at making the skyline look a bit different.

Heading further north, at Calpe, we took the road that skirted the coast just to keep our coastal theme going and here the buildings to house the holidaymakers that come to this coastline were a bit more conservative that the high rises of Benidorm and in tune with the winding coast.

Coming back to the N332 near Oliva we noticed the first spots of rain on the windscreen since way back in Lisbon at least 3 weeks ago.

This part of the coast had a lot of manufacturing businesses and there were more trucks using the N332 than we had experienced earlier in the day and our pace towards our destination slowed.

Again and despite the spotty rain there were ‘girls ‘on the roadside at the end of driveways waiting for some ‘business’ to come along.

We thought Gina was programmed to take us around Valencia but before we knew it we were in the middle of the city and negotiating roundabouts that had no marked lanes but were big and wide enough for three lanes of traffic to drive around it. And it was just on 5pm when Spaniards seem to wake up after their siesta and get back to business which also means driving their cars!

However we found our way through several twists and turns and were soon on the motorway north to Pucol.

We had an arrangement to meet our host at the apartment which is through Air BnB and had in our mind from pictures on the website that the apartment building was amongst other buildings at the seaside.

And that was how it turned out except Pucol township is 3km inland and the apartment is at the beach which is essentially one of those places where there are few permanent residents with the place flooding with holidaymakers only over the three months of summer.

Anyway this should mean a quiet area to stay in.

Our host was waiting for us after we had worked out the one way system to get to park in front of the apartment. It’s not that there is any traffic it is just that the streets are so narrow that one way is the only way!

Our hosts are from Lithuania and he had bought his daughter along to translate as he spoke or understood virtually no English. Having his daughter there was just as well because Lithuanian is like nothing else for an English speaker to understand.

The apartment was very modern and has everything we will need for a 2 day stay.....except there was no internet as it wasn’t working. We have found the internet available and working everywhere we have stayed so we were a bit shell shocked to find it wasn’t available. Apparently though it would be ‘fixed ‘tomorrow.

We took the short drive to Pucol town and again negotiated the one way streets to the Mercadona supermarket only to get another surprise for the day. The first supermarket car park where you have to take a ticket from a vending machine and a barrier arm lifts to let you in. Car parking in Pucol must be so hard to get that the supermarket keeps out any longstayers by making them buy groceries within a 20 minute period to get the car out of the car park for free.

The fun wasn’t to stop at getting into the car park as it continued when we tried to get out. We had only just been 20 minutes doing our shopping but we couldn’t make the red eye pick up our shopping receipt to raise the barrier arm and let us out.

The queue of cars was starting to build behind us and there nothing for it but to somehow reverse out to a parking space and let the others out. As I got out of the car to go back into the store to find a supervisor and try and explain our problem, a local woman waved her shopping receipt and pointing to the bar code on the bottom. I looked at our receipt and there was no bar code! No wonder we couldn’t get out.

I went back to the checkout operator and showed him that there was no bar code on what he had given us. Perhaps we were supposed to have told him we had a car and hadn’t come to the supermarket on foot and we needed the bar code to get out.

Bar code in hand we tried again and success!

Another experience on the BBA V3 that we won’t forget!

PS check out the Benidorm series on Youtube and you will see what we expected to see.....but didn't.

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