Wednesday 2 March - Xátiva

Where’s Bertie? He’s in a car park next to a sports facility, and opposite a retail park, in the town of Xàtiva (exact location: 38.99429, -0.52939.
Weather: Cloud-free until mid-afternoon when we reduced to sunny intervals. Pleasantly warm, maybe getting into the low twenties (one pharmacy sign said 23 degrees, another 19. Both were in the shade). 

I’d picked the town of Xátiva as today’s destination, but as the Aire at Bellús was barely out of our way, we swung by to use the service point. Unfortunately, a French chap (three beefy dogs all running free, a smell of weed, and a definite ‘free spirit’ appearance) in a converted horse box had just started filling his water. We emptied, got our hose out ready and waited for the tap. I don’t know how big his tanks were, but after half an hour (by which time a queue had built up behind us), we gave up, parked up just outside of the Aire and filled Bertie’s tank using our 5-litre bottles and a funnel, with Mick walking back and forth to the other tap on the site (unsuitable for hosepipes). I’d just poured the last bottle in when the French chap finished with the service point tap. The thing that annoyed us about his hogging of the tap was that he clearly wasn’t going anywhere. Indeed, he hadn’t even troubled to move his vehicle to the service point, instead stringing his hose across the site to his van. As someone who always worries about holding up anyone queuing behind us, I can’t understand the mindset of someone who could clearly have filled their unusually large tanks in stages, or at a quiet time of day, opting instead to hog the tap for 40 minutes at service point rush-hour.

As tempting as it had been to stay in Bellús, which would have almost guaranteed a quiet night, we opted to continue on to Xàtiva, where peace is less likely, on the basis that we spent three nights at Bellús in 2020, but had never been to Xàtiva. Or so I thought…

It was as we drove the windy road to get here that I said: “We’ve driven this road before. We’re about to get a view of a magnificent castle on a hill. Hold on! Have we been to Xàtiva before?” I quickly consulted my blog and, in my entry from 9 March 2020 I included this footnote: “We nearly got distracted by the town of Xàtiva, within 10km of our start point. When I spotted an impressive-looking castle/fortification spreading across the hill above the town I quickly looked up to see if there was anywhere we could stay in town. There was, but we steeled our resolve (we simply can’t stop *everywhere* that looks interesting!) and drove on.”

With Bertie parked up, after a late elevenses, we wandered across the road to Decathlon where I was able to buy the two items* I was seeking in Murcia last week. From there we nearly went out for lunch, but having checked out the restaurant for which we’d read a recommendation, we opted against (it being only two days since our last big lunch). So, a quick sandwich in Bertie, then into town we went.

We soon found three separate signs with maps showing a total of five different walking routes around the town, all with a different theme, taking in different points of interest. The problem was that there was nothing on the ground to indicate the route, and the maps only appeared every now and then, so they were impossible to follow, and I couldn’t immediately find any useful information online either. Some wandering took us to a large handful of points of interest, but after being spoiled in Alcoy yesterday, the tri-lingual signs outside each building of interest seemed to lack interesting detail. 

That’s not to say that there weren’t some magnificent buildings. This seemed unduly opulent for a hospital for the poor.

We loved the wonkiness of the buildings around the market square.

The one place that it might seem obvious for us to have gone is the castle…

I can’t see on the small screen of my phone how well it shows up in this photo. It’s vast, spanning almost the whole width of this photo. 

…but it looks like the sort of place where one can spend hours, and whilst I’m sure the entry fee would be good value for money (€6 for me; €4 for Mick), there weren’t enough hours left before teatime to feel like we could do it justice. Plus it’s an awful long way up and we were lacking the enthusiasm for the walk. 

Door of the Day (Contender 1)

Door of the Day (Contender 2)

^{(*One of those items was a pair of below-the-knee shorts, as I fear my current 20+ year old pair will split in an embarrassing manner any day now. Of course, many retailers think that girls don’t need shorts, or any clothing with a decent provision of pockets, so the range was small, with none meeting any of my requirements. So, I bought a man’s pair. Goodness! The joy of pockets big enough to fit stuff in!)}