Tuesday 8 February - Alhaurin de la Torre and Marbella(ish)

Where's Bertie? He's in a car park a stone's throw from the sea about 10km to the east of Marbella (exact location: 36.48867, -4.76954)
Weather: Overcast morning, with some sunny intervals developing this afternoon. Feeling cool (even if Bertie's thermometer told us it was 18 degrees!).

We were away from our parking spot in Alhaurin straight after breakfast for the 6km drive to the start of the hiking trail I'd selected for today. My research into route options hadn't been extensive: I did a search on Wikiloc, downloaded the first two on the list (which happened to overlap each other for about 500m) and opted for the one that didn't indicate it had a lengthy scramble involved. Whilst I had no firm information as to what the terrain would be like, we've done enough walking in Spain that I had a notion as to what I might encounter. The reality was that the first section went up the bed of a dry stream/river and was rocky and slow. The next section was not quite as rocky, but was steep, so slow. Then I topped out, just under 5km into the route, having taken 1 hour and 10 minutes to get there. Surely the descent would be quicker? It was, but not for the first kilometre, that I managed no quicker than the ascent. Finally the terrain included some sections that were runnable, in due course taking me to a forest track, then to the road and my start point where Mick (and Bertie!) was patiently waiting.

Paths

Views. As you can see, the cloud wasn't far above me. 

There was a quick consultation of the map before we moved on, to check that returning to Alhaurin was the sensible thing to do. It was, so we did, intending to stay another night.

Arriving there too early to go out for lunch, time was killed with the usual coffee/crossword combo, then we dedicated ourselves to watching the 4 workmen who are currently applying a lacquer coat to the imprinted concrete surrounding the parking area. Their inefficiency was quite outstanding. I had assumed that the sections that had already been lacquered were all done yesterday, but having witnessed their progress today I now think they've been at the job for at least a week.

At 1pm we adjudged it a reasonable time (by Spanish standards) to start thinking about lunch, so into town we headed. It's a town with a lot of eateries, but none we found was displaying a menu del dia. In fact, none of them was displaying even a menu. After doing a full round, we decided to go to the Italian place we'd espied yesterday.

Hmmmm. Not pizza for lunch today then.

Another round ensued, then I resorted to Google. The end result was a five minute walk to a Chinese.

A decent meal, but not the Spanish menu del dia we had been hankering after.

I do fear that the availability of menus de los dias (hmmm, not sure which word(s) should be pluralised) has been affected by Covid, with restaurants no longer able to offer such bargain meals. I had expected prices to rise, but the Menus we're seeing are still at the same prices as before (9-11 Euros in the main), but it seems there are fewer being offered. Or maybe it's just the places we've been and it's too early in our tour to make such an assessment.

Back at the car park we weren't immediately able to enter Bertie as, of all the places in all of the huge car park, we rounded his rear end to find a chap having a wee right outside of his door. Given the inappropriateness of the public place, I didn't politely turn my back, but tapped my foot and tutted whilst he finished, then stepped over the puddle to get in Bertie's door. That wasn't what caused us not to stay another night in Alhaurin, but rather we'd decided to get a headstart on tomorrow by going to our next destination today.

The place we'd intended to visit next was La Cala de Mijas, but comments on Park4Night indicated that the Aire there had also been closed down this week. I now doubt that information, as in passing I spotted lots of motorhomes, in a place that matched my recollection of the photo I'd seen. They were all within a confined area of a huge car park, so I suspect that motorhomes had spilled over into the rest of the car park and it was those who were asked to leave. Given we were on a dual-carriageway and had already passed the entrance by the time I formed this view, we didn't turn around to see if there was a space or any prohibition notices.

Arriving here to the east of Marbella we made a meal of settling on somewhere to stay. The first two car parks we visited had plenty of space, but Mick was unconvinced that they were appropriate for us to overnight. A check of photos on Park4Night suggested all of the options (of which there are many hereabouts, all positively reviewed) had the same issues. Eventually, having spent faaaaaaarrrrrrr too long staring at maps on my phone, I concluded that the best option for tonight was to just park on a street somewhere.

We did exactly that, but only a few moments later I spotted another car park (just behind where we were) on Google Maps, so we tentatively pulled in, unsure if it was public, or whether it belonged to the adjacent bar. Mick deployed his best Spanish and established that it's not their land, so hopefully we will have a quiet night here - except for the noise of the waves, which really aren't very far distant.

Statue of the day (trying to hide behind a large flowering bush)

Monday 7 February - Málaga and Alhaurin de la Torre

Where's Bertie? He's in a large (but largely empty) car park alongside a park, in the town of Alhaurin de la Torre (exact location: 36.6669, -4.5598)
Weather: Wall-to-wall sunshine and warm.

I did something highly unusual this morning: I got the bike out and went for a ride! Whilst Mick was running his long run along the seafront, I took a very similar route. The cycle path was excellent (laid out as a mini-road, initially on one side of a dual carriageway, then along the promenade) until suddenly it veered off into the city. I followed it, having a recollection from the map that it took an inland dink at one point. After a while I thought the detour had been going on too long, and sure enough a look at the map confirmed that a u-turn was needed. I wasn't prepared to cycle along the carriageway of the multi-lane road, so I then did a lot of pushing along pavements to get to where I wanted to go.

My turn-around point was at the port

The castle wasn't overly visible from below

Perhaps I should have locked the bike up somewhere and proceeded on foot for a look around, but I wanted to be back at about the same time as Mick which meant I had no time for such wanderings. My return saw me take some back roads and brave little sections of the main road, getting back to Bertie about five minutes before Mick (quite how neither of us saw each other when we must have been on the same road at the same time is a bit of a mystery).

My opinion based on the outing: I saw nothing tacky or offensive about Málaga at all.

Back at Bertie, a chat was had with a British couple in a motorhome, who stopped to ask directions to the service point. During an interesting chat it transpired that they've been in Spain for 2 weeks and had no idea that masks were mandatory outdoors. "Oh!" she exclaimed "So that's why so many people are wearing them!".

Once they'd gone on their way, I suggested to Mick that, as the signs prohibiting overnight parking were unlikely to go up immediately, we should stay another night. That idea was scuppered not ten minutes later when we learnt that the said signs had been erected - and not just temporary signs, but cemented-into-the-ground proper road signs.

The place had emptied remarkably even before we saw the signs had gone up

See that big bus of a motorhome? You can't see in this snap, but in the back of that car garage there is a full-sized domestic washing machine. Just after I took this snap, he set up a bar in the doorway and as we left there were six people having a midday drinks party.

No tour in Bertie is complete without at least one trip to a Decathlon store, so that's where we headed from the Aire. We left some considerable time later having spent the best part of €200, but as always, feeling like we'd got good value for our money (well, assuming that the duplicate charge on my credit card's pending list disappears; presumably relating to the first attempt at the transaction, which was declined when we dithered too long trying to work out how to make it charge us in Euro, not in Pounds).

A late lunch was had in Decathlon's car park, a quick shop in an Aldi across the road, then onwards we came to Alhaurin de la Torre. I chose this place for two reasons: 1) I'm running tomorrow, but Mick isn't, which means I could chose a hilly place (Mick's marathon is flat, so there's no value in him training on hills); and 2) with possibly 200 motorhomes being dispersed from Málaga today, it seemed likely that everywhere nearby on the coast would be busy whereas past experience suggests that just a few km inland we would be alone (that held true until I started typing this sentence, when a Dutch van has pulled in next to us; why immediately alongside when there are so many spaces to chose from, I know not, but I'm amused, rather than annoyed, by their positioning).

Random street in Alhaurin 

A quick look around this afternoon showed us a pleasant town with lots of eateries. Hopefully we'll find one that will suit us for lunch tomorrow, although first we'll have to go away and come back, as the route I've identified for my morning exercise is a few kilometres away.

Not fountain of the day. That was in the middle of a roundabout, so not an ideal location to take a photo. 

^{(Referring back to the comments I made yesterday about the Aire in Málaga, I questioned how an Aire 'designed for 100 motorhomes' could now be said to hold more than 300, yet it not be cramped. I did a bit more reading of news articles and it turns out that the intention was for motorhomes to park in an L-shape around two edges of the car park, leaving the rest free for users of the sports facilities. The council also only intended for people to stay for 2 or 3 days. This is, in my view, a situation where some signage would have gone a long way, because there was absolutely nothing displayed on signs, or on the ground, that suggested there was any particular area for motorhomes, nor stating a time limit. Our experience is that even with such signage, people will park in non-motorhome spaces and will outstay the limit, but at least then there are grounds for enforcement, rather than seemingly working on the basis that 'people aren't following our uncommunicated intentions, so we'll ban them all'. Enforcement, rather than a ban, would also, of course, have brought funds into the council (although once word gets around that enforcement is in place, the number of abusers will dwindle significantly). Such a shame that the facility has been lost, but at least we were able to use it on the final night that it was legal.}

^{As a second, unrelated, aside: before I took the bike out, I put a bit of air in the tyres. Removing the dust cap off the rear valve, I fumbled and dropped it. The surface of the car park was light grey, the dust cap black, but could I find the thing? I'd pumped up the tyre with the rear wheel in its folded position (should have taken a photo; it's a Brompton folding bike), so I unfolded it and refolded it, in case the cap had got caught under the inverted mud guard. After a bit more head-scratching and searching I eventually located it wedged in the most awkward position between the brackets of the rear rack. Bet I couldn't make it land there again if I tried!)}

Sat & Sun 5-6 February - Caleta de Velez and Málaga

Where's Bertie? After a second night at the Aire at Puerto de Caleta de Velez last night, tonight he's at an Aire just to the west of Málaga. (Exact location: 36.68416, -4.46067)
Weather: Sunny intervals.

Saturday
It was long run day for me yesterday (not that 'long' is particularly long at the moment, with this being Week 1 of my training programme towards an event in July), so I started the day, along with lots of other people exercising (including Mick for the first 3km), with repetitions of the beachfront at Torre de Sol.

I went away beyond the end of the seafront promenade and found a bull

It was also market day at Caleta de Velez, so after a shower (unlimited mains water! Indecently hot!), we went in search of the market place, finding it just a couple of minutes up the road. It was rather too crowded for my liking, so we only walked through part of it, before returning on the other side of the road. There a Chinese shop drew me in (vast and not in any way crowded), in search of safety pins, elastic and a roasting pan. I came out with one of the three. Although I'm sure they must have had the pins, I couldn't find them and I decided that I need to measure up before buying a new roasting pan, as I want to get the biggest one that will fit in Bertie's oven.

Popping into a panaderia for bread, we found it to also be a pasteleria and after drooling over the display it seemed only polite to buy a couple of slices

Our afternoon was accompanied by live music from the bar across the road, which after several hours was starting to sound rather samey, but it stopped earlier than expected, at around 5pm.

Sunday
It rained in the night! I only know this because Mick's exclamation of the fact woke me up momentarily. Otherwise, I slept like a dead person until my alarm rudely awoke me at 7am. An early start as I had another run to take, another shower to squeeze in (because if they're included in the price then why not shower daily?), and we needed to leave by 10.30. We achieved it by a good margin.

Málaga was our chosen destination for today. We avoided this section of coast on our tour six years ago, heading inland to bypass it, having it in our minds as an awful, tacky series of package holiday resorts that wouldn't be our cup of tea. Our short trip to Benidorm in 2020 (not to mention Blackpool in 2019) established that, out of season, such resorts can, in fact, be okay, so Málaga made it onto the list for this year.

We were half way here when I went to read one of the comments on Park4Night to Mick and found that a glut of new comments had been posted, all saying that this Aire is being closed down this week. Other recent reviews also painted it such that we had a picture of a shanty town, covered in litter.

A quick bit of Googling confirmed that yes, the local council had a meeting on Friday and decided to effect a ban on motorhomes as of this week (officially from tomorrow, but not to be enforced until they can get the signs made and erected). It seems that the popularity of the place (a story I read in a local newspaper said that it was designed for 100 motorhomes but 'there are now more than 300, including tents and other vehicles*') has attracted complaints.

Did we still want to come here, we wondered? After a bit of dithering, I decided that as it's still a legal place tonight, and as it would be a good location for Mick's run tomorrow, it would be worth coming even if it was awful/dirty/full of party animals.

Driving into the place we were pleasantly surprised. Yes, there is a bit of litter on some of the exterior verges (as there is on all the verges between here and the seafront) and there is a disgusting amount of toilet paper behind each bush and tree, but the vast parking area itself is clean and tidy, with relatively neat rows of motorhomes, few of which look like they've taken root. Moreover, with the car park being sunken from the surrounding roads, and in the midst of sports facilities, it's not overlooked by a residential area. So, it's a mystery as to who it's offending, and a shame that a sledgehammer is being used to crack a nut when there are other solutions that could be used (and potentially be more lucrative to the council).

Being right on the west edge of the town (city?), we haven't been all the way into the centre - and may well not do so during our stay. We did, however, walk a couple of miles in that direction, only turning around when it became a bit too crowded on the seafront promenade.

I'm sure it doesn't look anywhere near as busy in the snap as it felt in reality.

The good news I learnt today is that the outdoors-mask-wearing law is being reviewed on Tuesday, with a view to removing it as of Thursday. It being a weekend, bars and restaurants are busy, and we've walked past establishments housing multiple large tables of groups of people, all sitting in close proximity indoors, shouting at each other and (quite legally) not wearing masks, whereas we've been out in the fresh air, with nobody in the immediate vicinity, with noses and mouths covered. It will be a great improvement to our time here if the requirement is removed. (Incidentally, we reckon the rate of adherence to this particular law is approximately 50%; bizarrely, the majority of the time when there's a couple walking towards us, one of them will be wearing a mask and the other not.)

One final thing: parakeets! Must mention the parakeets! We've been surrounded by vast colonies of them for the last couple of days and they don't half make a racket.

Taken on this morning's run at Torres del Mar. There had been a dozen or more sitting on this patch of ground until the moment before I took the picture. At least two stuck around for the snap!

^{(*We have seen no tents. There are a few caravans. All of the motorhomes are widely spaced apart so the 'designed for 100 but now there are over 300' statement is a bit odd. As for the toilet paper behind the trees, given that there's a service point with toilet emptying facilities here, I very much doubt that the occupants of the motorhomes (plenty of which are vast things that cost hundreds of thousands of Euros) are the culprits there (because why would you go and poo outdoors in a public place when you've got a toilet on board and somewhere to empty it?), but rather the very few car and van dwellers.)}

Friday 4 February - Caleta de Velez

Where's Bertie? He's in a municipal Aire at the marina at Puerta de Caleta de Velez, where it costs €9.55 for 24 hours (who but a council would price something thus?). Toilets and showers are included, but the motorhome service point costs €3 extra. Exact location: 36.74813, -4.06546.
Weather: Mainly overcast and feeling cooler. We even had a few drops of rain at lunchtime, but not enough to class as a shower.

It seems that just about every car park or pull-in where it's legal to park a motorhome on the coast in southern Spain is in use for that purpose. It also seems that you don't have to go very far inland to have a place to yourself, as we did at Torrox last night - just 4km from the coast. It wasn't a bad spot to spend the night, even if the adjacent road was surprisingly busy considering its limited destinations, but unless the traffic coincidentally stopped as we retired and restarted as our alarm sounded this morning, we once again did an excellent job of sleeping through the noise.

Showers were the first order of the day, and in the latter stages of the water heater doing its thing, I spent a few minutes looking at where we may go today (the itinerary has us still in Nerja...) and it struck me that all of the favoured options were Aires with facilities. As going to an Aire would render the long wait at the service point yesterday and the heating of water for showers today nugatory, it was tempting to head further along the coast to a free no-services sort of place. The final decision was not to cut our noses off to spite our faces, so here we are at Caleta de Velez.

Our entry into the Aire went smoothly, although when I went to enter our details into the machine it told us that the space we'd parked in wasn't available and not were most of the empty spots. I'm sure we would have been fine saying we were in one spot but actually in another, but fearing doing the wrong thing, we took the best of the bunch that were showing available. That has, unfortunately, put us a little nose-down.

Given how the entry system works here, it's bamboozling as to how its knowledge of how many vehicles are here has got out of whack (the obvious answer of tailgating on the way out shouldn't work here), but this afternoon we've seen multiple vans fail to gain entry even though there are empty spaces inside. Frustrating for them, undoubtedly.

There's not been a whole barrel of activity for us today. We walked a few kilometres along the coast, through Torre del Mar just after lunch, then just before tea we walked the other way, through Caleta de Velez. From what we saw, Torre del Mar is by far the more appealling direction. I shall explore further in that direction tomorrow morning.

The only snap I took today

Alas, the weather has turned a little less fine today and for the next week we are forecast to see more cloud and lower temperatures. Still pleasant by UK winter standards, but not as sunny and warm as we had it last week.

Thursday 3 February - Nerja, Frigliana & Torrox

Where's Bertie? He's in a free car park on the edge of the town of Torrox. Exact location: 36.76109, -3.95557.
Weather: A few high clouds floating around, but mainly sunny and warm (21 degrees).

The negative reviews of the car park in Nerja (for the purposes of sleeping) mainly involve noise through the night. There must have been many comings and goings, straight past Bertie as we were parked by the entrance/exit, but neither of us noticed them. The only thing that vaguely woke me up was the emptying of the bins*, but even that didn't disturb me sufficiently to make me look what time it was.

Our 24 hours were up at just gone 9 this morning, but we'd already decided that we were going to go a little into a second day, as the time of sunrise and the lengths of runs we were doing this morning didn't really accommodate that early a departure.

I didn't mention yesterday that when I referred to running up the river, I really meant alongside a dry river bed.

We only ran together today for the first kilometre or so, as our objectives were at odds (Mick: marathon pace; me: speed intervals). I'd just finished my intervals and was heading the 3km back to Bertie, when Mick ran towards and past me. As I was quite near the end of the track at that point, I expected he would soon catch me up. Sure enough, a while later I looked back and he wasn't far behind. Next time I looked he was nowhere to be seen, and when I got to the point from where I expected us to return to Bertie together, he was still not within sight. It turned out that he'd expected me to do what I said I was going to do (I seldom do! I go out with a notion as to route, then a better idea strikes me whilst I'm out), so was waiting at the bottom of the river for me. Thanks to mobile phones, we were reunited and back to Bertie we went.

The fact that we were now paying 3 cents per minute to stay in the car park focussed our minds on not tarrying too much longer, so I soon headed to the pay station, then back to Bertie when I discovered it only takes cash (not something I generally carry), then back to the paystation.

The vast car park (not all captured in this snap) where Bertie spent last night. You can just see his front bumper behind the silver van, left of shot. The vans either side of us were not in use. 

Our next stop was a free car park on the edge of Nerja, with the thought of taking a gentle walk into the adjacent natural park. The parking is generally reported to be sloping, but one recent reviewer said they'd found a spot where one could get tolerably level. We drove a few laps of the area, but failed to find anywhere that was even vaguely level (even taken advantage of Bertie's natural front/back slant). It wasn't even suitable for a breakfast stop, which was becoming a matter of urgency, so we backtracked to a supermarket car park in town for that purpose.

By the time we'd breakfasted and I'd spent an age at the checkout in the shop (they had some mispricing issues going on, affecting both the people in front of me), we had concluded that we were going to return to the town car park for another night. First, however, as we were out and about, it made sense to visit the service point.

The service point in question is at a petrol station to the north of Nerja, just off the motorway, and we timed our arrival badly. By the time we'd worked out the location of the facilities (which turned out to be in the van-wash bay), another motorhome had just pulled into it, and it transpired they didn't just want to use the emptying and filling points, but also to give their van the most thorough wash that any motorhome has ever received. I kid you not, we were 40 minutes waiting for them to finish, and having already paid our €3 for the use of the services plus a €5 deposit for the key (which we couldn't obtain until the people in front of us had returned it), we felt inclined to wait.

By the time we pulled into the bay, there was a whole host of motorhomes waiting, so we were as quick as we could reasonably be, and were just finishing when someone else came in, squeezing past Bertie, to empty their toilet. They apparently thought that the charge didn't apply to them, and were most miffed when, as they went to use the tap, I quickly put the padlock back on it. Telling them that they needed to pay and wait for the key, they protested that they only needed 5 litres. In all honesty, had they asked nicely rather than presuming and barging, then I probably would have let them use it, but my general thought on the point is that this service point has been provided as a commercial enterprise by a business, and to use it without paying is theft. If we'd been sitting in an all-you-can-eat restaurant, having paid our fee for being there, would they consider it appropriate to come and join us at our table and start eating our food, on the basis that 'Well, we only want a few chips'?

Anyhoo, with Bertie all serviced, back to Nerja we were to go ... or were we? By now I'd noticed that we were half way to Frigliana, which I know to be another attractive pueblo blanco, and a look at Park4Night told me that there was some day-parking up there that was suitable for larger vehicles. So, we took the chance that there would be a spot available in the middle of the day (apparently at the weekend, even at this time of year, it can be full by late morning), and headed on up.

Frigliana is indeed a pretty old town (the prettiest in Spain, so they claim, although we later found that this is due to an award won in 1982), and thus is also very touristy, although thankfully relatively quiet for our visit.

Frigliana snaps

Back at Bertie**, we thought we may as well sit a while at the roadside parking, enjoying the view, rather than returning immediately to the Nerja car park, and by the time we'd sat there a while, I'd come up with a different plan: instead of returning to Nerja, of which we've already had a taste, why not go and take a look at the neighbouring town of Torrox instead?

Hence, that's where we are. It's another pueblo blanco built on a hillside, but not quite as pretty as Nerja or Frigliana (it does, however, boast of having the 'best climate in Europe'; they didn't explain the basis for the claim). That's perhaps why I completely failed to take any photos when we took a walk around, save for this one of the mask-wearing statue in the square:

In the absence of any fountains today, I'll go with this statue of the day

The one thing that did strike us about this place is that whereas in Nerja we heard various languages being spoken (and plenty of Spanish amongst them), every single person we have heard since arriving here has been a Brit or Irish. Perhaps a snapshot that is misrepresentative of the reality of the town, or perhaps not.


^{(*Bins in Spain are communal, located in the streets and emptied overnight. In the places we tend to sleep, we expect to hear them at some point during the night, so it surprises me to find other motorhomers giving a parking place a bad review for that reason.}

^{**Who did we find just a few spaces up the road, but the Swedish couple who had thought it okay to help themselves to the service point without paying. They had the side door of their van open, and had they been eating (and we not been in Covidian times) it would have been too tempting to hop inside, take some of their food, and drive home the all-you-can-eat buffet analogy.)}

Wednesday 2 February - Nerja

Where's Bertie? He's in a very large car park conveniently positioned for both the town and the beach at Nerja. It costs €12 for a 24 hour stay (no facilities). Exact location: 36.74729, -3.87344.

Weather: Wall-to-wall sunshine and warm.

Last night's parking spot was a not only as quiet as we expected (except for when an animal, presumably a cat, tried to climb over Bertie - something that's happening too much at the moment, and can't half make us jump), and was also extremely dark. Nipping out to water one of the nearby bushes just before bed, we opened the door to the sight of ...absolutely nothing. With no light pollution and no moon, we may as well have been blindfolded.

There was nothing to hold us there beyond a nightstop, so we were on the move straight after breakfast, over which we had discussed where we were going to stay in Nerja. There are no motorhome Aires, and the campsites are expensive, leaving us with the options of staying just on the edge of town for free, or right in the thick of things for €12. Because we wanted to give Nerja more than a cursory look, and because our first activity on arrival was going to be a run, preferably along beachside, we opted to pay. 

Arriving at just gone 9am, it wasn't long before we were heading out. An alleyway took us out of the car park and into the old town, where our immediate impression was that Nerja is indeed a nice place. 

Typical of the side streets we came across. 

Regularly checking the map on my phone, whilst also trying to gaze around me, I navigated us through the old town to the beach, along which we ran until the promenade ran out, then continued along a track, then onto the sand we went. When it became too soft for my foot to be happy (it still doesn't like too  much lateral movement), we turned around. A jaunt up the river followed, up the west side as far as the second bridge, then back down the shaded east side. By then the temperature was such that the shade was welcome. 

Snaps from the run. I have no recollection of taking the second one. 

It is eight days since we last put any water in Bertie's tank, and then we only half-filled it (60 litres). Supplies are now dwindling such that showers weren't an option post-run, but it doesn't take much water to have a flannel wash, then we squandered some of our (also dwindling) drinking supply on both cold drinks and coffee. We'd barely had the last sips when lunchtime was upon us, so more eating was done before we headed back out for some aimless wandering. 

Art imitates Mick at one of the viewpoints we found.

Sculpture of the day

A good and pleasant time was had walking the streets and observing that this is a very multinational place. Naturally, our ears are  primarily noticing the Brits, of which there are lots, but we've also heard Dutch, German and French voices, and there are more than a few Swedish registered vehicles in this car park too.

We also noted an absence of grafitti, and that all of the buildings are well maintained. I'm not sure if we just didn't stray into parts of the town which are less well-kept or if the property market here is such that buildings don't get abandoned and left to ruin and/or if there is some other town policy that keeps everything so neat and tidy. 

After a sufficient amount of wandering, a bar called to us, where I learnt that although I like both coffee and olives, they really don't go together. Mick had more success with the beer/olive combination. It was good coffee today too, and cheaper than yesterday's mediocre cup.

A quick look at another beach, to the east of where Bertie is parked (everything else we'd done had been to the west), and it was back to Bertie for a late second lunch. 

When in Spain...

Before the day was out, we needed to do something about our drinking water situation. With the assistance of Open Street Map a tap was located only a 500m or so walk away, although we did the distance twice in each direction, having remembered just as we returned to Bertie the first time that his windscreen washer bottle showed signs of running out this morning, so that's where most of the first bottle went. 

I'm not sure yet what we're doing tomorrow. The final decision may come down to how urgent we consider it is to empty Bertie's toilet and get some more fresh water on board. 

Tuesday 1 February - Almuñécar

Where's Bertie? He's in a parking area high up above some nudist beaches in between Almuñécar and Nerja (exact location: 36.74784, -3.77745)
Weather: Wall-to-wall sunshine and warm enough for shorts and t-shirt except when in both the shade and the wind.

Today has flown by! By our standards, we have been busy. I was out for a run before the sun came up...

Snaps from this morning's run - up the river, along the seafront then a detour up to 'The Rock Viewpoint' for a view of the less-attractive back side of the town.

...and by the time I got back Mick had Bertie ready to roll, so all I needed to do was to have a quick wash and throw my running gear in the wash bag, and we were off.

The first stop was all of 1.5km distant: a petrol station with a laundrette on its forecourt (one of the 'laundry in a glass container' rather than of the al-fresco variety). It seems frivolous to be doing laundry this early in a trip, but we hadn't got enough water to rinse the running gear through by hand, and we weren't parked in a place where I would have considered it acceptable to hang washing out, so the laundrette it was.

An hour later everything was washed and dried, and I had belatedly breakfasted (the glass-box of a laundrette had two reserved parking spaces right outside, so I could watch the washing going around whilst I ate in the comfort of Bertie). Lidl was the next port of call, to get everything on the list that I'd written for the intended shopping trip last Friday.

With Bertie's fridge looking much healthier (and finally with some fresh oranges in the boot; 4kg should keep us going a few days!), off to Almuñécar we went.

Our destination there was the main car park and we did have some concern that it may be full at noon on a weekday. It was certainly busy, but Bertie found a suitable space and after coffee, crossword and first lunch, we headed out to have a look at the town.

The seafront boasts an impressive array of stunningly ugly buildings, and at least one of the cafe/bars serves decidedly mediocre coffee, but the viewpoint at the end of the promeade was worth the climb.

The photo doesn't do justice to the glorious colour of the sea, nor to the ugliness of many of the apartment blocks.

Next was a walk through the old town and whereas our guidebook describes it as 'attractive' we weren't that taken with it. It's not unattractive, but it's not anywhere near as pretty and interesting as others through which we've wandered (such as Solabreña two days ago). We eventually found the top of the old town - a pretty square which was probably the best feature we saw in the place. What we'd expected to find up there was the castle, but it turns out the castle is slightly lower down. We soon navigated our way to it, but I've apparently not learnt my lesson about checking the opening times of castles before visiting them:

Is it going to become a theme of the trip: photos of closed castle gates?

There didn't seem to be anything left to hold our attention in Almuñécar and the main car park was the sort of place that we would have stayed had there been a reason for us to remain in the town, but it wasn't attactive and didn't look promising for a quiet night.

That's how we came to find ourselves in this large parking area just off the coast road. There must be a way down to the nearest beach from somewhere hereabouts to justify all of this marked-out parking in such a remote location, but I didn't find it when I went out to investigate earlier.

Looking down towards what Google Maps tells me is a nudist beach (talking of which, we espied some naked people at Almuñécar. They were secreted between some rocky outcrops on the beach and perhaps unaware that they were visible from the viewpoint above).

^{(*Just one last observation about Almuñécar: there are more estate agents in that town than I've ever seen in one place before, by quite a margin. There must be an incredible number of properties for sale.)}