Sunday 7 February – Archidona (via the Alhambra, Granada)

Where’s Colin? He’s in a municipal Aire in Archidona at N37º5.447’, W4º23.336’. It’s not going to go down as one of our best night stops of the trip (in fact, at the moment, I think it may well lie in last place), but it was a pick of a non-spectacular bunch hereabouts, and this one was the nearest.

We were woken just after 4 this morning by the sound of water plinking on Colin’s roof. We were parked under two trees and they were dripping on us. In the absence of the sound of rain, we guessed that we were in the cloud. By the time the alarm went off a definite sound of rain had joined the dripping. On any other day we would happily have stayed in bed until it had passed, but this morning we had an especially early start for an appointment with the Alhambra. It was that appointment which also caused us to drive off in fog thick enough for us to repeatedly wipe the windscreen, thinking it was misted up – we wouldn’t ordinarily choose to drive in conditions like that either.

Arriving at the Alhambra parking area (happily just below the cloud base) just after 9am, we made the split-second decision not to go into the coach and caravan area (with all the other motorhomes) but instead to go into the car park, in the hope that would result in a €2/hour charge, rather than €3/hour. It wasn’t really a naughty thing to do, as Colin is small enough to fit into a standard car space – as long as we can put him somewhere with a foot of overhang room at the back of the space. At that early hour, we had our pick of the place and he was soon sitting comfortably in a suitable spot.

So, did we dash out ready to get on with our sight-seeing? Nope. Our arrival coincided with the weather absolutely lashing it down and there was no way we were going out in *that*! Coffee and toast filled the waiting period and as the rain stopped, out we stepped.

A couple of minutes later I was trotting back to Colin so that we could do our good deed for the day. A chap on the other side of the car park had mistaken the location of a parking space and had driven his car off a kerb so high that he couldn’t get back up it. We happen to have a pair of ramps that we thought would be just the ticket to help him out of his predicament, and so they did (with a bit of assistance from me and his missus, pushing from behind, whilst Mick lined him up from in front).

With the ramps back in their proper place (and only a bit of an alarming moment when the ticket collection machine said we had no tickets to collect - silly us, we were at the wrong colour of ticket machine; it was the red one we needed…) we were soon inside this huge, and quite incredible, Moorish fortress. Just over four hours were spent there (and we could have spent much more, but with the danger of becoming cultured out), taking more photos than I can recall ever taking in a day before (but I’d guess probably only a fraction of the number taken by many other visitors). Here’s a small selection:







A cup of tea and a bite of late-lunch was had in Colin before we took a stroll down to the old town for a look around before we declared our visit to Granada complete. Our parting visit to the car park pay machine established that we had been charged the car rate, thus our 6-and-a-bit hours came in at €12.40 – a bargain when our original plan of two nights on the nearest campsite, plus a bus, would have come in a nearly €44.

With only a stop for LPG (57.3c/litre) another ‘big’ journey west was made. Another whole 50 miles in fact, the location chosen purely because it was an easy option (i.e. there’s an official motorhome Aire here, so we didn’t have to drive around trying to locate some suitable parking) which lay close to the route of our onward journey. There are three other vans here: two Brits (one parked right across the service point, even though there’s plenty of other spaces), and a German (who I very nearly visited when I mistook their van for ours!). 

As for the verdict on Granada, and more specifically the Alhambra, it was a grand and worthwhile day out. In fact, I’d be quite happy to visit again, as I think there’s really too much there to take in on one visit.

Saturday 6 February – Bea de Granada

Where’s Colin? He’s at an ACSI campsite at Bea de Granada, about 20km east of Granada, at N37º12.515'; W3º 29.327

Finally waving goodbye to Abla, we pointed Colin initially towards Guadix this morning (for a quick supermarket stop), where houses cut into the rocks (but with normal house-like fronts) were apparent all around us. The scenery around there was pretty spectacular too. From Guadix it was on to Bea de Granada, making it quite a big driving day for us – we’ve moved a whole 50 miles.

It was at exactly 11.08, as we passed kilometre marker 278 on the A92 motorway that something surprising happened: Colin’s cab fan sprang back into life (after exactly four weeks of only working on max speed). There was no apparent prompt for the resurrection; we hadn’t just gone over a bump, had a change in weather conditions or anything like that. That scuppers my diagnosis that the resistor had gone (the highest speed bypasses the resistor, hence when the resistor dies the first three speeds go with it). Maybe it’s just a dodgy connection. Maybe at some point I’ll contort myself under the dashboard and see if I can see. Or maybe I’ll just wait to see how long this resurrection lasts.

It was just before noon when we arrived at our campsite and picked ourselves a pitch. I think we chose well, with this view out of Colin’s side door:

The picture doesn’t do it justice. There’s lots and lots of snow up in them there hills. Not bad for €15, and with laundry only being €3 a load too.

Just over an hour later, our pitch was strung up with flapping washing on an excellent drying day (the bedding was all ready to come in after half an hour in the sun and keen wind, which was a bonus, as we had far more stuff to hang out than we had drying space available).

Whilst the washing dried, I entered round 2 of my battle with the Alhambra ticket website. Round 1 happened early this morning when I’d tried to buy the limited-access tickets which were still available for Monday, having discovered yesterday that the tickets which include the palaces had already sold out for next week. The process was complicated by the purchasing pages reverting back to Spanish (even after I’d selected English on the previous page) leading to much copying into Google Translate (see footnotes 1 and 2). By the time I had all the details filled in, in a way the website would accept, I got what I thought was a ‘timed out’ message, having taken longer than my allocated 5 minutes to do all the translation and tapping out of details on my phone. However, the translated message wasn’t entirely clear, and I didn’t want to end up buying multiple sets of tickets, so I gave up for the time being.

This afternoon, after checking my credit card and email, I concluded that we hadn’t got tickets, so I tried again. Aaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhhh! Now it wouldn’t let me even buy the limited tickets for Monday!

Not to be defeated, I tried various tickets on various days and thus came to find that some of the all-areas tickets had become available for tomorrow. Now being more familiar with the requirements of the website, I wasted no time in snapping them up.

The only slightly complicating factor is that there’s no Sunday bus service. We can, apparently, park at the Alhambra, which on the face of it is silly-expensive for parking a motorhome, but on the other hand I’ve read that they have security there, and by visiting the town tomorrow instead of Monday we’ll save ourselves two nights at a campsite plus bus fares.

With tickets bought, we thought we’d get a quick leg-stretch in with a stroll down to the village and back. What had struck me about the place, from a distance, is all the green grass surrounding it, and that all of the houses have pitched roofs. It doesn’t look like anywhere else we’ve been on this trip so far. However, even though it sits in truly stunning surroundings, there’s nothing much of interest within its streets, except for this scary-rabbit-come-teletubby scene:

The rabbit/teletubby on the left does have an octopus on its head

As an antidote to the rabbits, I’ll finish with another snap which is similar to the first one, but taken from half way down the hill towards the village:

 

<sup>(Footnote 1: I’ve now realised I was using the wrong internet browser on my phone. If I’d been using Chrome it would have offered me translation within the browser.

Footnote 2: I’m posting these blogs using Bloggeroid (see Footnote 3). I’ve now twigged that if I put more than one asterisk in Bloggeroid then it thinks I want the text in bold. Hence changing from multiple asterisks to the word ‘footnote’.

Footnote 3: Threes excellent Feel at Home feature allow me to use my phone in Spain (and various other countries) at no extra cost, so I’ve bought a bundle which gives me lots of data, texts and calls. Unfortunately, Feel at Home doesn’t allow tethering or hotspot usage – a fact of which I get reminded via a message every time I optimistically try to connect the laptop to my phone, so I’m typing these posts on the laptop but then having to transfer the text to my phone to post them. For reasons unknown, Three has no objection to Mick’s phone connecting to mine via a hotspot.)</sup>

Friday 5 February - Abla, again

Where’s Colin: He’s back in the same place again for the third night, having spent the day in the same place as he spent yesterday.

I’d heard tell of something that we witnessed this morning, but it still took us both aback to see it first-hand. The chap in the next van to us, having emptied his toilet, proceeded to walk straight past the immediately adjacent ‘dirty jobs’ tap and went instead to the (clearly labelled) drinking water tap, which he stuck straight into the neck of his toilet cassette. Yuck! I’m not sure whether he was stupid or a disgusting ignoramus, but either way, a baby-wipe and a bottle of bleach was deployed before I filled our water bottles.

Having enjoyed a very lazy start to the day, the market was just starting to wind down by the time we had relocated ourselves back to the other Aire and set out to explore the town further, aided by the ceramic town tour tiles in the roads, and the Rutasalpujarra website. By the time we made our way back down towards Colin the market was half way through packing away. It seems like a lot of effort they go to, in travelling and setting up substantial stalls, just for a few short hours of trading.

Our standard lunch of salad ensued, then just as the town closed down for siesta, off we went back up the road to complete the walk we started yesterday. It wasn’t far and we were back by 3.30, with a decision before us: should we relocate three kilometres up the road to the place I want to visit tomorrow, or should we just stay in Abla again? Given the short distance involved and that there’s an official Aire here, whereas the parking options up the road are unknown, we couldn’t see a good reason to relocate, so here we are again (just us tonight, so far).

The next major place to which we’re heading is Granada, with the intention of seeing the Alhambra.  We’ve timed our movements intentionally this week so that we’ll arrive in Granada on Sunday, ready to visit the town on Monday. I’d read all of the information in the guidebook, so was aware of the ticket process, but it was only today that I thought I’d explore the on-line ticket system (as our intention had been to just turn up and hope tickets were available first thing in the morning). It was rather a blow to find that next week is shown as being entirely sold out if we want to visit the entire place (there are tickets available for some bits, but not for everything). Harrumph! Harrumph! Harrumph!

Thursday 4 February – Abla

Where’s Colin? He’s almost precisely in the same position that he was in last night, albeit he did go out for a little drive today. He has three neighbours tonight. During the day (parked in the other municipal Aire) he was being absolutely dwafed by a monster of a motorhome which is home to a Brit, Simon, and his wife.

It was a chilly start to the day! Down to single figures inside, we clicked on the heating for the first time since Segovia, nearly 3 weeks ago.  



Almost everything that we’ve done today has been reported on t’other blog (gayleybird.blogspot.com). The only other activity was a spot of planning this afternoon, which saw Mick banished to one of the single seats as I spread out maps and reference books over the sofa. The end result of that exercise was the conclusion that two months is not anywhere near long enough for this trip. We will have to come back!

Wednesday 3 February – Abla

Where’s Colin? He’s at a free municipal Aire, with services, just outside of the town of Abla at N37 909.247 W2 46.640.

I’m so glad that my error in planning the grocery shopping (i.e. needing to resupply on a Sunday when the vast majority of supermarkets are closed) caused us to take a diversion down to Berja yesterday, as otherwise we would not have visited the recreation area by Castala and would have missed out on the superb walk we took this morning (as described at gayleybird.blogspot.com).

At just gone noon we were back in Colin, and by just after 1 we had coffeed and snacked, lifted a manhole cover outside of some closed public toilets to solve the ‘we need to empty the toilet today’ issue (unnecessary as it turned out, as we’ve found ourselves on an Aire with services tonight) and made our way back down to the town of Berja.  

I’d spotted on the www.rutasalpujarra.com website that it was the location of another town/village tour, and figured that as we were so close we may as well check it out.

Having now sussed that there’s always parking near the start point, that’s to where I set the SatNav, which demonstrated to us again that there is a good reason to park on the outskirts of Spanish towns and walk in: they have very little streets. Thank goodness there was one parking space left in the car park; Mick may not have been happy to have made that drive for nothing!

Following ‘This way to the town tour’ ceramic tiles in the roads, I couldn’t resist a play on this, the best playground toy:

Mini-digger playground toy. Mick nearly had to drag me away kicking and screaming.

Beyond the digger we duly found the map and information at the start of the route. Such a pity that the bars are necessary to prevent the information being obliterated by graffiti:

This route was longer than the others we’ve done (at 2.4km) with 22 points of interest being described on the webpage (some with ‘interesting’ English translations). Few of the points of interest were that interesting by themselves, but the information given about them did answer other questions we’d had over the last few days (such as what was being mined in the area and over what period, as well as giving some more information about the past grape-growing in the Ohanes area).

This building, held up by extensive bracing, was interesting, not for who it belonged to and from what period it dates, but by the fact that the tour notes gave details of the interior together with some pictures. There is now no interior- just the outer walls and much steelwork:

I know nothing about this building beause it wasn’t mentioned in the tour notes, but the decorated facade caught my eye:

Back at Colin we pointed his nose back north, to the hills, taking a detour on the way to search out some very cheap diesel we’d seen advertised (83.9c/litre for ordinary diesel; we splashed out on the extra quality stuff as a treat for Colin’s engine, at 88.9c/litre). Finding the fuel station was difficult enough (it seems the cheap places are hidden away in industrial estates); working out how to obtain fuel was more so, until we found the ‘pre-pay here’ machine (which thankfully spoke English). We came away without Colin full, because it’s always a bit difficult to guess an exact amount when you have to prepay.

Up was the direction we then needed to head, as I set our destination for the north side of the Sierra Nevada range. Shunning the options of going over the highest pass, or going all the way around, we’d opted for the lower pass, which turned out to be a pretty good road. It also turned out to have so much steep downhill that it wasn’t advisable to do it in a high gear. We got about seven eights of the way down before a nasty smell of burning invaded Colin’s cab (conveniently just moments before we got to a place we could pull of the road). We paused for drinks whilst Colin’s poor smoking brakes cooled down, whereafter we tackled the rest of the road in first and second gears.

Five minutes later we were pulling into one of the two Aires in the town (village?) of Abla, finding (to our surprise) another van here. We’ve certainly not been on the popular tourist trail over the last few days, having gone from seeing a dozens of motorhomes a day at the coast to seeing almost none since we came inland. We also get the impression that we’re a rare breed by the amount of staring that’s coming in our direction.

Tuesday 2 February – Castala

Where’s Colin? He’s in a big recreational park just outside of Castala at approximately N36º 53.097, W2º55.394. By the amount of parking and facilities, it looks like this place must get absolutely heaving with people in summer.

At just after 9 this morning we were winding our way back down the tiny road we had ascended yesterday and heading a little bit west, towards an area just to the north of the village of Laujar de Andarax, where the lady in the Tourist Office in Almeria had told there was good walking to be had.

She was absolutely right too and a 10km circuit was enjoyed (more of which on gayleybird.blogspot.com) under yet more clear blue skies (albeit with a bit of a nippy start to the day).

I would very much have liked to have stayed up there tonight and sampled one of the other routes tomorrow, but (as I said yesterday) the need to re-stock the cupboards could no longer be ignored, so by mid-afternoon we were heading down, down and down some more, to the town of Berja and a supermarket.

Suitably restocked a decision was then needed as to where to spend tonight. ‘To the coast’ was the first decision, until the SatNav told us it was a bit further than anticipated. ‘To the hills’ was my next suggestion, as I noticed that we were really quite close to the other area the Amerian Tourist Office lady had named for good walking.

I had no information as to where exactly the walking routes were located and no information as to where we could park, but I figured there was a good chance if we found the former we would find the latter and by following our noses, together with a dose of good luck (spotting a parking sign in the distance through some trees), we managed to come straight here.

Tomorrow morning we have various walk options, then we have another decision point: coast or hills. As we will be needing some facilities tomorrow, that may dictate our final decision.

Monday 1 February – Ohanes

Where’s Colin? He’s at a viewpoint/‘recreation area’ (otherwise known as a picnic spot with barbecues) above the village of Ohanes, at N37º2.550’, W2º45.031’.

We’ve certainly had more fine days than grey ones since reaching Spain, but today was a corker. Not even a whisp of cloud and it was warm with it – although potentially some of the warmth was self-generated by virtue of walking around on the side of a steep valley.

After a quick shufty around the street market in Canjayar, where we spent last night, and establishing that the two ‘supermarkets*’ there weren’t going to be of use to us in solving our grocery deficiency, we set off onto some steep winding roads for the village of Ohanes, chosen as our destination by virtue of having a viewpoint symbol on our road map.

My hope that the viewpoint would have a car park was dashed, but after a quick sortie on foot I did locate a parking area at a different viewpoint, right up above the village. Multi-point manouevres were required on some of the hairpins to get Colin up here.

Out into the village we went, discovering as we took the town tour (as yesterday, ceramic waymarkers were inset into the road, and this time I had loaded the information page onto my phone) a good handful of ‘improvement projects’ signs, like this one at our viewpoint/recreation area:

What we really liked was the public accounting right down to the last cent, because it’s really important to be accurate right down to the last 63c when spending €31k …

The impressive outdoor gym, with 10 pieces of equipment, had been funded too and I had a go on most of the apparatus, declaring that if we had a gym that good in our village then I would use it.

Good bit of scaffolding! Note how none of it goes anywhere near the ground and very little is made of metal. Not sure that would get past UK H&S.

We had seemingly stepped back in time as we made our way through the tiny village streets, passing on our way a load-carrying donkey, and eventually found our way to the start point of the village tour (we’d joined it half way through) which gave us an excellent view of the place: 

After a look at the exterior of the church and the main square, next up was the public wash house, but I doubt that doing laundry there was an efficient process, as surely the washer women would have been too distracted by the view:

A little further along we got a good view of the extent of the terracing in this steep valley. We had thought, from the vantage point of the village that agriculture here had been largely abandoned, but later explorations up the valley told us otherwise – it’s just that the planting is not obvious from a distance:

With our village tour complete, and having failed to find a bar for lunch, back to Colin we went, to sit out the midday sun. By 4pm it was time for another look around and having identified on the map what appeared to be a feasible route, off we went. It turned out not to be feasible (goodness, Spanish maps are low on detail and accuracy), but we still had a nice stroll up a tiny little lane, which took us to another picnic area (EU funded, this one), next to a running stream (there’s not a lot of those around in this corner of Spain) and a little way beyond was this:

It was just gone 5pm by the time we finally located an information sign detailing a walking route from the village, but at 24km long it was too late in the day for that discovery. A quick out and back along it completed our leg-stretching of the day, and we arrived back at Colin just as the sun sank over the hills opposite.

Tonight I’ve managed to make dinner out of the few ingredients we had left in Colin’s fridge and pantry, but tomorrow we are going to have to take a diversion to a big shop. Maps and t’internet have been consulted, and I have a plan…

(*Think small, untidy convenience stores but with an exceptionally diverse range of stock. They may not have stocked much that was of use to us in the food department, but we did pick up a washing line for 70c and, if we’d had the need, could have picked up a pressure cooker and a percolator too…)