Saturday 21 February - Vilanova d'Alcolea

Where's Bertie? He's still in the Aire at Vilanova.

Weather: Not a hint of a cloud seen all day. Cool overnight, but reaching 18 degrees this afternoon, although with a cool breeze.

We aren't very far inland here, but we are at an altitude of 350m where the nights are cooler than down on the coast. We certainly would have wanted the heating on first thing, if I hadn't had a loaf ready to go in the oven. The oven duly heated Bertie, and the loaf turned out to be a good one too.

The cool start caused us to be slower getting out the door than may otherwise have been the case, so it was ten to ten by the time we finally made it out of the car park (we'd exited Bertie for the first time a few minutes earlier, but one of us was proving to be disorganised ... and it wasn't Mick).

The route I'd downloaded led us mainly off-road, via an excavated Roman site, to the next village along. There we took a detour to the bar for coffee, only to see on our approach that the outside seats were empty and the door shut. Mick was just complaining that I'd lured him out under false promises of refreshment, when I tried the door to find it open. The seats inside were set out in the manner of a school canteen, and were also all empty. "Are you sure you fancy this?" I asked, and with Mick's nod, in we went. It turned out there was one set of customers, sitting on a terrace on the other side of the building, but we must have just preceded rush-hour, as more came in whilst we sat there. 

The coffee was excellent, but it didn't take us long to polish off both that and our toast, before we headed back out to the next point of interest. We'd already passed a large bicycle, and now we were to do a loop that would take us past a chair. A very steep and heavily washed out incline was involved in getting there.

Our route then took us back to the village and straight past the bar, but I maintain that, due to the time of day, we were right to have made the detour on the first pass. We were then on the (slightly longer) return leg back to Vilanova, via quite a few points of interest with information signs, although most were only in Valencian Spanish. I'm slow enough reading Castilian, and even though many of the words in Valencian are similar, there are enough differences to make them largely incomprehensible to me. Still, we got the gist that they had water management systems to assist with agriculture, including water wheels and donkey-driven pumps. Talking of water, the streams were all running well today, giving us a few obstacles to tackle in the form of fords, all of which (with some faffing) we managed to cross dryshod. 

A large group of walkers were met just before we got back to Vilanova, with many a ¡hola! exchanged, then it was time for us to peel off for the climb back up the hill to the village. The church, which doesn't look that imposing when you see it from the front (in a residential street, in between houses), looks massive when seen from the NW. Reaching it was the sign that we were nearly back at Bertie.   

It wasn't the best route I've done in this region, but it was inoffensive, with some mildly interesting history dotted along it. It came in at just over 13km with 250m-ish of ascent. 

Roman site - we only took a cursory look around.

Big bike, little Mick

Cafe y tostada

Big Chair, Little Mick

One of the POIs

For a considerable distance (over a kilometre), a path had been constructed using membrane and gravel, however, for most of its distance, the gravel has been washed away, leaving great swathes of membrane, either lying flat or bunched up as a trip hazard. A lot of time, effort and funds, but I don't think they quite got the engineering right. 

 

Shortly after we saw this mural... 

...we reached the next POI, where the info sign showed the original photo that had been replicated on the mural.

A surprisingly large church when seen from this side.

 

View looking back to where we'd just passed the group of ramblers (some of whom are in shot) 

 
  

 

 

 

Friday 20 February - Vilanova d'Alcolea

Where’s Bertie? He’s in a municipal Aire on the edge of the village of Vilanova d’Alcolea. Exact location: 40.23196, 0.07808

Weather: Sunny and warm

Our final few days in Peñíscola involved the usual activities of us pottering about, walking through the hills, running along the seafront promenade, topped off with some local eating and drinking.

We’d finally tried out ‘Hogar de Jubilado’. That translates as ‘Retirement Home’, which doesn’t sound like the obvious place to go for coffee, but contrary to its name, it’s just a café. I’d noted it to be heaving when I’d run past last year, and it’s very much a locals’ haunt, so we thought we’d give it a go. Good call! Aside from the wares being good (the apple cake was so good I was a bit sad to only have tried it on our final visit), I managed every order without receiving a response in German or English. Indeed, the second time we visited, the server correctly told us what coffee we wanted.

We would have gone back there on Wednesday, except that turns out to be their closing day, and also the closing day of the other place we had earmarked to try (the one by the market, where we nearly went last year but it was market day and too busy). We ended up at a rather more upmarket seafront café followed immediately by a menu del dia at Miguels (where they remain convinced that we are German). Mick would tell you that I complained for most of that entire outing – justifiable in that it was jolly cool in the seafog that was cloaking the town, but unjustifiable in that it was entirely my own fault that I’d under-dressed for the weather.

Normal service had been resumed on the weather front by yesterday (sunny and warm), when we returned to the Retirement Home for a final coffee date. I ran there, the long way around, whilst Mick set out some time later and walked the short way. Ordinarily, I’m pretty good at judging how long it will take me to get somewhere, but on this occasion I hadn’t factored in an accidental race*. Arriving to find Mick not there, I wondered if I'd been stood up, but no, it was just that I'd arrived unfashionably early.

This morning, after 11 nights at Camping los Pinos, it was time to leave town. Our Chunnel back to the UK is two weeks on Sunday, so it felt like time to go and look at some other places nearby. There are a number of municipal Aires just inland in the Castellón region, with the downside that many of them offer free or very cheap electric hook up, but this one has far more spaces than hook-up points, so I was optimistic about finding a free spot. My optimism was not misplaced; after a 35 minute drive** we arrived at around noon to find only the electrified spaces were taken (it's significantly busier as I type this just as the sky is glowing orange with the last dregs of sunset).

A wander around the town this afternoon showed it to have few points of interest and ‘interest’ was a loose description of those places that featured on the Tourist Information map and the audio tour. The audio tour would have been better if: a) it had been possible to play it on double speed; and b) there had been a way to access the recordings other than via QR code, in that we only found two of the codes and thus couldn’t learn about the other two POIs we visited. Maybe the remaining short section of town wall would have been more interesting than just being a nondescript wall of unknown age, if we could have learnt something about its history … or maybe not!

Tomorrow we shall venture a little further afield, on foot, on the locally advertised Petite Randonnée route.

Excellent apple cake

A day of sea fog kept temperatures down and hid the castle

One of the colourful sunsets snapped on the way back from the campsite dishwash. 

(*The accidental race was really quite annoying, all related to a man who wouldn’t be overtaken. He’d been moving so slowly as he passed the campsite, that as I walked along the road by way of a warm up, he wasn’t opening the gap between us. When I burst into a jog, I soon caught him up, but as I came into his sight, now on the opposite side of the road, he sped up. The two of us running at the same pace, on opposite sides of a pavementless road, was a problem for traffic, so I thought, given how slowly he’d been going, that I’d just put a bit of a spurt on and get past. So he sped up again. And repeat. Everytime I upped the pace, he upped his too. I couldn’t be doing with such ridiculousness on what was supposed to be an easy outing, so once it became clear that he wasn’t going to let me pass, I stopped dead, resisted calling him any offensive names, and then resumed once he was a good way past. He duly slowed down again.)

Tuesday 10 to Saturday 14 February – Peñíscola

Where’s Bertie? He remains at Camping Los Pinos.

Weather: warm and dry Tuesday to Thursday (20+ degrees daytime highs). Overcast and some rain Friday morning. Extreme wind today, but gloriously sunny.

There’s nothing much to report. We’re just pootling about, enjoying ourselves doing not very much.

We both headed out into the hills on Tuesday, with Mick turning back (as planned) at the signed junction to Vistahermosa, whereas I carried on with the Castello Pulpi being my intended objective. It was only when I got to a closed path and checked to see if it was a turn I was supposed to be taking, that I discovered that I’d gone awry about a kilometre earlier and was merrily walking off down the wrong side of the hill. Ooops. No matter – as long as I was moving over rough terrain with plenty of ascent for 3 hours, it didn’t much matter where I went, so it turned into an out-and-back with a few branches attached to it (the other two branches were intentional!). 

 This was not where I intended to be!

Embarrassingly, this is the junction where I'd gone wrong. 
 

On Wednesday we discovered that our favourite cafe y tostada bar has permanently closed – a surprise as it was always so busy last year. We went to another place that had looked popular when I’d passed previously, but found that they didn’t offer tostada, only ham sandwiches (perhaps the clue was in the  name: El Nuevo Jamón). It was a very good ham sandwich, but also not the bargain of tostada in a local bar. 

Thursday was a three-course lunch at Can Miguel, which featured the comedy of me speaking Spanish to the waiter and him replying in German, persistently, the whole time we were there. Having failed to disabuse him of his notion as to our nationality, there’s the danger, like going past the point of telling someone that they’ve got your name wrong, that he may remember us and we will now forever be German to him. That creates the bigger danger that at some point he will say something in German that we don’t understand, forcing us to come clean.

I would usually make a collage of these photos, but technology is conspiring against me.

Alas, the meal likely contained something that my body has now randomly and erroneously decided is Very Bad, and the ensuing migraine had me feeling sorry for myself overnight and into yesterday. That made most of yesterday a write-off, which was actually reasonably well-timed given the grey sky and showers. The furthest we went was to the supermarket (about a 3 minute walk away).

We were back in Bertie when suddenly sirens started sirening. We have four phones onboard, and three of them were connected to the network when the government issued an emergency alert for a red weather warning for hurricane-force winds in this area today. The other phone sirened when I turned it on at bedtime. This is interesting, as I didn’t receive the alerts sent out on either occasion when the UK system was tested.

Needless to say, it’s a bit blowy out today and as I type this it’s still 3 hours before the winds are due to peak, but it’s going to stay windy until the early hours of tomorrow.  

......

Later... just after I typed the above, another emergency alert came through, reminding everyone not to travel today. As it goes, we don't think the winds got anywhere near the forecast levels (140km/h), as there's no evident significant destruction from what we can see around us, although there were certainly some big gusts and staying indoors felt like the safest choice. By 6.30pm it was still remarkably blowy, but had settled down enough for us to think that venturing over to the dish washing area wasn't a foolhardy expedition. The way the roof was rattling over there was a bit alarming; a speed dish washing session was completed.  

Bonus snap #1. Forgot to mention that we also took a run down to, and along, the seafront on Thursday morning, except I had to walk most of it because my shins and ankles were protesting so much after Tuesday's outing.

Bonus snap #2: taken in the campsite toilets, mainly to marvel at the length of the single-word title. 
 

 

Monday 9 February - Peñíscola

Where's Bertie? He's at Camping Los Pinos on the edge of Peñíscola, at a cost of €15 per night including electricity, wifi and all campsite facilities. The price is up €2 on last year, but it's still a bit of a bargain for what you get here. 

Weather: Sunny and warm, after a cool night with some overnight rain. 

There was a feral cat feeding station next to last night's Aire, which was nice from the point of view of watching the cats, particularly at feeding time, but not so good when they started climbing into Bertie's engine bay - I'm sure they must do it in all vehicles, but in Bertie's A-class motorhome body, you really hear them moving around in there. Mick went out to scare one out at one point; on another occasion some sharp raps on the dashboard did the trick. 

The short period of dawn rain had abated by the time we were ready to leave, which was good for me as I ran a quick errand, nipping to the bakery just up the road. I've not made any bread since we left home, so a loaf of some description was what we needed, and an impulsive purchase of a large Palmera occurred too.

Less than two hours later, we arrived in Peñíscola, heading for the campsite where we spent 3 weeks last year, hoping they would have a pitch for us. We got an actual pitch this time (last year we spent all of our 3 weeks in the concrete car park area), although arguably the worst one on the site, being the only one outside of the entrance/exit barriers, and nearest to the road. However, it's also one of the few real pitches (grit surface, hedges on two sides, a wall on the other) where its orientation means that we could position Bertie's nose towards the sun for maximum solar gain. It doesn't matter if the general temperature at this time of year is mid-teens: as long as it's sunny, we are toasty warm inside. As it goes, it's forecast to be 20+ for the next couple of days.

After elevenses, a crossword and lunch, I headed out into the Sierra d'Irta hills, just for a 1.5hr out-and-back, rather than one of the many circuits I did through those hills last year (I considered a circuit but was wearing brand new cropped leggings and knew that if I ventured further I would encounter seriously spikey undergrowth that would likely snag the fabric. I'll wear shorts next time, so it's my legs that suffer rather than my clothes). It may be a tad unexciting to return to the same place as we visited last year, to do the same routes through the same hills, but for the next couple of weeks we will be happy with the repetition. Mick was mainly working whilst we were here last year, so can explore more of the hills, and for me I'll have the benefit of mainly knowing where I am and where I'm going. Hopefully our favourite bar (for coffee and tostada) and restaurant (for lunch) will remain largely unchanged too.

 

Snaps from the local hills

Sunday 8 February - Alcañiz

Where's Bertie? He spent the night at a municipal Aire in the town of Alcañiz. 

Weather: A grey, sometimes wet morning, but a sunny and warm finish. 

 

We've now spent a total of two nights at a Camping Car Park location (the same one, twice, a year apart), and this stay didn't go entirely smoothly, in that when we came to leave we keyed in our code, it acknowledged it and said 'Good Bye!', but the barrier failed to open. These locations are all unmanned, and I feared an unwelcome delay to our departure, but a very brief phone call to the displayed number had us released within a minute or two. Pretty good service, particularly considering that it was relatively early on a Sunday morning. 

It was a grey, dull morning as we drove south out of France, which became a remarkably wet morning as we passed into Spain. The border really did mark the change from merely grey to monsoonal rain. Quite unpleasant driving conditions. 

Bertie's fuel light had been on for a while by the time we entered Spain, so we knew we were going to have to stop at the first motorway fuel station, which we also knew would be cheaper than even the cheapest fuel stations in France (€1.549 vs €1.662). There we briefly contemplated: to fill up, or to just pop €20 in to fill up later, somewhere cheaper. We opted for the former, which probably wasn't the most sensible choice given how many places we passed at 25-30c less per litre between there and Pamplona (for my future reference: taking the free road around Pamplona passes a cheap fuel station without needing any diversion into the town).

With it being a Sunday, almost no lorries were on the roads so we opted for the free road to Pamplona then onward to Tudela, with Google telling me that the difference in time would be less than 10 minutes. We stopped for lunch somewhere along that section and had a brief chat about where we might spend the night, deciding to head to Alcañiz and decide on arrival if we wanted to stay there or continue all the way down to Peñiscola. 

It had been another long day of driving, and we'd had enough by the time we got to Alcañiz. Arriving at gone 4pm, we wasted no time in heading out for a quick walk around the town - we needed a leg-stretch anyway, and having seen the striking sight of a massive church atop the hill with a castle a short distance away, they enticed us for a quick, urban, pre-tea explore, rather than striding off along the river. Verdict: it's the sort of place that, if the weather was just a bit warmer, we might have stayed for a couple of days. 

Usually we manage to time our walks around Spanish towns when they're absolutely dead, but 1630 is the time of day when people are just emerging back onto the streets after Sunday lunch out, so whilst it wasn't busy on the streets, there were people around. 

With the locals having just finished their lunches, we were ready for tea, so back to Bertie it was.

These long driving days are disproportionately tiring, so it was another early night, ready for one more early-ish start, but this time just for a final 1.5hr hop to our destination.   

A striking church, the centre piece of the view as you drive into town, and the castle over on the nobble on the right. 
 

If I'd been abducted by aliens and dropped into this street I wouldn't have struggled to know I was in Spain. 

The front face of the church, but the more impressive view was from below, from where you could see the scale of the building. 

  

View from the castle

(Margaret B: if you're reading ... seeing that Alcañiz is on one of the camino routes, I'm guessing you've probably been there? If so, did you stay at the Parador?)

 

Saturday 7 February - Castets

Where's Bertie? He's at a Camping-Car Park Aire at Castets, at a cost of €14.72 including electricity. 

Weather: Mainly warm and sunny. 15 degrees outside for much of the afternoon and absolutely roasting inside Bertie. 

We were away from Villedômer at ten past eight, and opted for the same route as last year, taking the toll road from Tours to the S side of Poitiers. The price on entry to the Péage remains 90c, but the price on exit has increased to €22. Mick was driving and I'm sure he would say that it was worth it for the mindless sitting with cruise control engaged and not having traffic lights, roundabouts and endlessly varying speed limits to worry about. 

In another repetition of our last two such journeys south, we stopped at Reignac at lunchtime, where there's a car park next to a Voie Verte ex-railway leisure route. We timed our arrival well; it's only a small car park and it was full, but as we sat for a moment contemplating our options, two women strode back to their car and promptly drove away. Mick walked east along the route; I trotted off west, and we reconvened at Erica an hour later, where Mick had lunch on the table. 

It was then just a two hour drive to our night-stop. We stayed here on our dash north last year, and decided that we would use it again. It's not as interesting a location as Capbreton, which has been our chosen staging point for years, but it has the merit of being immediately next to the motorway. 

I'm not sure where we're headed tomorrow. We're aiming for the east coast of Spain on Monday, but that gives us a lot of options for tomorrow. I'd best look at a map after tea, the making of which is what's next on my agenda.  

Friday 6 February - to Villedômer

Where's Bertie? He's in the Aire at Villedômer, where he's been several times before.

Weather: Some sunshine, some overcast, some showers. 11-14 degrees.

Last summer, Bertie's windscreen wiper motor twice ceased to function. The first time, I cleaned migrated grease from the internal contacts and revived it. The second time we were on the road without all the tools needed and an auto-electrician sorted out a corroded earth for us. It has worked faultlessly ever since - at least until we were about two minutes into our journey yesterday, when Mick turned the windscreen wipers to intermittent, and they parked themselves half way up the windscreen. 

It didn't take long to establish that they were working fine, save for the park position, which in turn meant that it would be in our favour if it rained for the entire journey and thus we could just leave them running. It rained most of the time, so the time they spent in an inconvenient position was minimal. 

By the time we stopped for tea in Tesco's car park in Ashford, I'd concluded that this couldn't be a repeat of the grease migration issue that caused the first failure (and that I know can also cause a park issue), but had to be that the wiper mechanism had slipped on the motor spindle. As we sat at the Chunnel terminal, I offered to sort it out, but given that it was both dark and raining, Mick suggested that it could wait until this morning. 

So, the first task in our leisurely start today was to disconnect the wiper linkage from the motor and reposition it. It was a relief to find that the securing nut wasn't even hand tight, confirming the diagnosis, and thanks to having taken it apart so many times last year, I could immediately see that it wasn't in the correct position. It can't have taken more than five minutes to sort it out.   

The wipers were called into use a few times during the day, but the more notable features of the weather were the warm (relatively) temperature and the periods of sunshine. It has been so grey and miserable at home for all bar a scant few days thus far this winter, that it was a pleasant change to see the sun and feel such heat through Bertie's panoramic windscreen. 

There's nothing else to say about today's journey. Each year I check my handwritten notes in our road atlas, and read my blog to see what we did on the previous year's journey. I don't need to make any notes about the route choice this year, as we did exactly the same as last year. The one toll road section we used had gone up by just 20c. The only stops (save for a driver-swap micro-pause) were at a supermarket at lunchtime (groceries first, then lunch in the car park), and a petrol station just before our destination. We arrived in Villedômer at quarter past five, which didn't feel too bad considering we didn't hit the road until a few minutes before 10am. 

Straight out for a brisk, but brief, leg-stretch we went, ending at the patisserie to sort ourselves out with something for pudding tonight:

 

The stream next to the Aire in Villedômer is running high

Bit soggy on the fields too

From the local patisserie (sorry - too much effort to rotate it now I've uploaded it)