Saturday 16 January 2016

Saturday 16 January - Santa Pola

Where’s Colin? He’s at an ACSI campsite at Santa Pola at N38º12’3” W0º34’13”.

As of yesterday morning, the plan had been to have one more stop before we reached the Med coast, to avoid the need for any long days of driving. However, after last night’s very cold night I looked at the forecast for tonight’s stopping point and when I saw a sub-zero temperature it suddenly looked attractive to spend a whole day driving so as to reach some warmer weather sooner.

As long journeys go, they don’t get much more straightforward than getting from Segovia to Santa Pola via the route we took. On the road at 8.45 and arriving at our destination at 16.30 (with stops for coffee, lunch and grocery shopping on the way), all bar about 5 minutes of the day were spent on very good roads. None even approached what I would consider to be busy (not even approaching Madrid in what might be considered ‘rush hour’), and one in particular stood out as being a newly built motorway where a motorway is not needed. This was its almost constant state:

In about 40 kilometres on that road, we didn't even see 20 vehicles (and that’s counting the ones going the other way too).

The scenery was interesting, and once we’d passed Madrid and cleared the enormous plane beyond, plenty of rugged, lumpy bits were to be seen all around us:

Quite a few castles standing on rocky outcrops were seen too. This one was the best (yep, dreadful photo; these snaps were taken out of Colin’s windows whilst we doing 60mph and this one partiuclarly suffers from a reflection in the window):

The campsite we’re on isn’t of a sort that I would ordinarily choose. It has 362 tight-packed pitches and most are in use. However, the location worked for us today and it did mean that we were able to get pitched, replenish Colin’s water tank (manually, via bottles and a funnel – today we had the right size connector for the tap on our pitch, but the tap was too corroded to use it), have a cup of tea and still get out for a stroll before dark. In fact, we set out just at sunset and having finally found our way to the marina, we managed to just catch the end of the colourful display over the water:

3 comments:

  1. "Cleared the enormous plane"...huge jumbo?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Bigger than that. More like an A380 on steroids...

      (I did notice the plane after I'd posted (honest!) but was too lazy to try to edit it.)

      Delete