Wednesday 27 January - Vera

Where’s Colin? He’s at a commercial Aire just outside of the town of Vera, at N37º14.932, W1º51.251. I’m not sure what the basic price is but including electricity it’s €11. It’s a large place for an Aire, with 120 places. Being built on a hill, it’s terraced and we’re quite high up, which is good – except for the fact that all of the facilities are right down at the bottom.

Let’s start today with a look at the key components of Colin’s reference library:

A road atlas, a Rough Guide, a copy of All the Aires and Volume 2 of the ACSI camp site guides.

Having no forward plan for this trip, I refer to all of these often, and during last nights episode of flicking through the pages it came to my attention that there’s a dearth of Aires and ACSI campsites for the next chunk of our journey. Whilst it’s possible that that ‘chunk’ could be completed within a day, it’s also possible (based on experience to date) that it could take us several. It’s also not escaped my attention that, after 17 days on the road, the laundry bag was at the point of ‘a full load’ and certain items of clothing are getting a bit pongy (the benefit of never seeing the same people two days in a row is that we can just keep wearing the same clothes day after day, without anyone save ourselves being aware of the repetition, until they become offensive).

So, today’s plan, which required a 10km diversion inland, was based solely on doing some laundry.

Arriving at the Aire at 11am, our check-in became a little disjointed and rushed when Mick came into the office to tell me that Colin was leaking. At a glance, I immediately knew what had happened – Colin was parked on a steep hill with his rear nearside (or offside in mainland Europe, I suppose) wheel being the lowest down. In the rear nearside of his dirty water tank is the connection point for the shower-room sink. That connection came adrift at least a year and a half ago, and I’ve not been moved to do anything about it because we have never yet used that sink. However, if his dirty tank is full – or is half full and he’s parked at a particular angle – then the missing inflow connection will act as an overflow, and that’s exactly what had happened. We hastened to the service point to empty his tank (incidentally, Colin has the worst designed dirty water emptying system that we’ve seen on any motorhome, ever. Most motorhomes empty their tank at a gush within a couple of minutes; we take about a week and a half of a slow trickle through a small-bore tube and tap).

I then hastened to the laundry, where I found seven machines, two of which were out of order and the rest were in use. I waited patiently as various people came in, looked at their machines, tutted and left. It was only when two of the machines had finished and a woman came to collect her washing that I learned that the machines were taking between 2 hours 20 and 4 hours to complete a wash cycle, and the spin speeds were so slow that the loads were coming out wet. It was 12.25 by this time, and the site has no drier, so I needed time to get stuff dry in the sun. On the plus side, I saved €5, as I chose the most urgently needed items out of the washbag and did them by hand. An hour later we had landry scattered all about our pitch (really wish I’d bought a folding rotary airer!) and as our little drying rack requires one of Colin’s windows to be open, we’ve not been able to go out, meaning that our afternoon is looking like this:

Back to the coast again tomorrow. The bit that we drove along today was very picturesque and the road atlas has the next section highlighted as being similarly so.

View from our pitch (omitting the chainlink fence which lies between us and this).