Where's Bertie? He's at an Aire in the small town of Ceutí, about 10km or so north of Murcia. He also spent three nights here in the middle of February 2020.
Weather: Some overnight rain, but not enough to leave wet ground this morning. Overcast most of the day (high of about 18 degrees), but with a few glimpses of sun this afternoon.
After 3 nights on the wasteland at San Juan de los Terreros, we were away before 9 this morning, driving a whole 2km to park outside a laundrette in town. Within the hour, everything was washed (bar the one sock that escaped the laundry round-up), dried, folded and put away, and off we went.
Given the length of drive we had ahead of us, it was negligent not to have made travel mugs of coffee whilst waiting for the laundry. What I had, however, done during that period was to write out the days that are remaining on this trip and a list of places we want to visit. It turns out that there are significantly more days than places, and although we're not going to have any trouble finding places that we don't yet know that we want to visit, I didn't get any further in the planning. For today, so as not to have too long a journey, we took the easy option of aiming for somewhere we'd been before (having visited this area twice before, we've already sampled most of the motorhome parking areas, and a fair few car parks, that lie within a short detour of the direct route through the region).
The journey was broken with a quick supermarket visit, allowing Mick to make hot drinks whilst I shopped, then to Ceutí we came.
The car park here is exactly as we remembered it: full of long-term residents who are seemingly happy to spend months sunning themselves in a car park in an industrial area of a not-very-pretty town. Each to their own.
We were impressed to see an Amazon Prime van pull in and make a delivery to one of the vans! I know we've had a take away delivered to Bertie before, but it wouldn't have occurred to me that we could have Amazon deliver to us in a car park in Spain.
A stroll was taken into town after lunch, but having done the tour of the sculpture/artwork trail previously (now described as an open-air museum), there was nothing cultural for us to do here (if you want to see a selection of the art we saw here previously, Click Here to see my post from 2020). Our main objective was to establish that the café/pastelería we liked is still in business (it is).
Arriving back to the Aire we decided to put some water into Bertie's tank using the labour intensive method of carrying bottles from the service point to pour in via a funnel and hose, rather than moving Bertie to the service point (or indeed, waiting until tomorrow, when the facility may or may not be busy when we want to use it). It gave us a bit more exercise, and we weren't short of time.
I then set about fixing a couple of things. The blind in Bertie's door broke last November, and just before this trip I effected a fix*, but last night that fix failed. The cause of the failure was obvious, so today's fix is more robust, and was quick to effect. The other issue was that the bathroom door handle was coming loose. My problem with that fix is that the allen keys I have with us are part of a penknife-style set, and the 'body' holding the set together was too big to allow me access to the grub screw I needed to tighten. I clearly needed to remove just the one allen key, but to do that I needed an allen key... A bit of fiddling around finally got it released and, for now, the bathroom door handle is back in a secure state.
Talking about shoddy fixes, I don't think I've ever seen a door patched up in a more 'cartoon style' way!
(*that isn't to say that I entirely fixed the blind. My fix involved four shirt buttons, a cable tie, and the sewing of one bit of cord to another. I know how to fix it properly, but I just can't work out how to remove one of the parts I need to access. Before we came away, I also made a removable curtain for that window, so we always have that to fall back on.)
Weather: Some overnight rain, but not enough to leave wet ground this morning. Overcast most of the day (high of about 18 degrees), but with a few glimpses of sun this afternoon.
After 3 nights on the wasteland at San Juan de los Terreros, we were away before 9 this morning, driving a whole 2km to park outside a laundrette in town. Within the hour, everything was washed (bar the one sock that escaped the laundry round-up), dried, folded and put away, and off we went.
Given the length of drive we had ahead of us, it was negligent not to have made travel mugs of coffee whilst waiting for the laundry. What I had, however, done during that period was to write out the days that are remaining on this trip and a list of places we want to visit. It turns out that there are significantly more days than places, and although we're not going to have any trouble finding places that we don't yet know that we want to visit, I didn't get any further in the planning. For today, so as not to have too long a journey, we took the easy option of aiming for somewhere we'd been before (having visited this area twice before, we've already sampled most of the motorhome parking areas, and a fair few car parks, that lie within a short detour of the direct route through the region).
The journey was broken with a quick supermarket visit, allowing Mick to make hot drinks whilst I shopped, then to Ceutí we came.
The car park here is exactly as we remembered it: full of long-term residents who are seemingly happy to spend months sunning themselves in a car park in an industrial area of a not-very-pretty town. Each to their own.
A stroll was taken into town after lunch, but having done the tour of the sculpture/artwork trail previously (now described as an open-air museum), there was nothing cultural for us to do here (if you want to see a selection of the art we saw here previously, Click Here to see my post from 2020). Our main objective was to establish that the café/pastelería we liked is still in business (it is).
Arriving back to the Aire we decided to put some water into Bertie's tank using the labour intensive method of carrying bottles from the service point to pour in via a funnel and hose, rather than moving Bertie to the service point (or indeed, waiting until tomorrow, when the facility may or may not be busy when we want to use it). It gave us a bit more exercise, and we weren't short of time.
I then set about fixing a couple of things. The blind in Bertie's door broke last November, and just before this trip I effected a fix*, but last night that fix failed. The cause of the failure was obvious, so today's fix is more robust, and was quick to effect. The other issue was that the bathroom door handle was coming loose. My problem with that fix is that the allen keys I have with us are part of a penknife-style set, and the 'body' holding the set together was too big to allow me access to the grub screw I needed to tighten. I clearly needed to remove just the one allen key, but to do that I needed an allen key... A bit of fiddling around finally got it released and, for now, the bathroom door handle is back in a secure state.
(*that isn't to say that I entirely fixed the blind. My fix involved four shirt buttons, a cable tie, and the sewing of one bit of cord to another. I know how to fix it properly, but I just can't work out how to remove one of the parts I need to access. Before we came away, I also made a removable curtain for that window, so we always have that to fall back on.)
I thought the boarded up shop was for sale but my on-line Spanish translator says "it is sold." They certainly don't want you to make a mistake with the phone number.
ReplyDeleteYou have an erroneous answer from your online translator, as 'se vende' does mean for sale. If the building wasn't enough of an eyesore, they've made it so with all that phone number grafitti!
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