Adventure Into The Unknown ?

So, in my last ramblings we were waiting to take the car for its bi-annual ITV Test, the result of which would dictate when, or even if, we could get away on our holiday. The whole inspection process, although very thorough, like a well oiled factory production line process, had only actually taken a little over fifteen minutes and I cannot describe the sense of relief that I felt when the technician handed me back my vehicle registration document, accompanied with the all important vehicle windscreen sticker that reflected that my car was ‘officially’ roadworthy until September 2027, when the next inspection would be due. Of course, I waited until I had cleared the test centre before punching the air in celebration and shouting ‘Yes, get in there !!’ 😂 So, once again we had managed to evade the mischief of those ‘Dark Forces’ by being prepared for their potential ambush so, by way of a quick word of warning to you my reader’s, beware, for they may now be on the lookout for revenge and look elsewhere for ‘other’ less suspecting victims 😲

So that was one very urgent matter sorted, now it was time to address yet another important one, yes I of course mean the holiday, but to where, if indeed anywhere 🤷‍♂️ So, Shazza my beloved, the spotlight is now firmly shining on you, it is decision time ‘Where, if indeed anywhere, do you want to go ?’ She looked at me, knowing how much time and effort that we, that being me and my OCD Buddy, had put into sorting the three potential options, “I don’t really fancy all the hassle with airports and flights” she said, a bit cautiously, followed swiftly by a question of her own, “Do you ?”. I looked at her and just smiled, “So our original Plan A it is then, a road trip” I said, and to be totally honest, I was pleased with that decision. I like road trips and so had been looking forward to conducting yet another one of our exploration’s around some other part’s of Spain, areas that we had not visited before, and for me, using our own car was so much more preferable and convenient although, as I was very quickly to discover, it was not going to be quite as simple as sticking to my original ‘Plan A’ route 🙄 Shazza informed me that she did not now want to go all the way, which, considering our ages and lack of motivation towards such things, I told her that that did not come as a big surprise to me, she let out a cheeky little giggle 🤭 “I meant, all the way to the North Coast of Spain” she said, “I know exactly what you meant” I replied, then gave her a cheeky little wink. But even that piece of news didn’t really matter that much to me, Spain is a big country, with simply loads of places that we have still yet to discover, and let’s face it, their is no hurry to do any of them, so that area of the Northern Spanish Coast can go on the back burner for another future trip 😉 We sat down together with the road atlas of Spain, and yes, I do still use the paper versions, as well as ‘Google Maps’, and in conjunction with some useful travel guide books that we have and which we will take with us, we planned an initial route. We agreed to plan only the first two stages of the trip, to cover our first seven day period, but how long we actually spent on the road after that initial period would then be completely up to ourselves, just as long as we were back home no later than the 30th September, as Shazza’s mum was arriving on the 3rd October, and before her arrival we would have some domestic stuff to do. We didn’t want to hang about and agreed to depart on the Monday morning (8th September), allowing us a period of twenty-two days, if in fact we chose to utilise all of them. Although I will admit that at times like this we do begin to miss our ‘Little Fokker’, the freedom that it gave us to stop virtually anywhere we wanted, without having to rely on making accommodation bookings for the night’s we required, or finding somewhere convenient to stop and eat lunch, or dinner But, at the end of the day you cannot always have ‘everything’ that you would like, and so compromises sometimes have to be made, their are advantages and disadvantages to lots of things in this life 🤷‍♂️

Sunday, the day after our vehicle inspection, was a bit hectic, cleaning the apartment before we departed, it is a habit we have gotten into and it would save us a job when we eventually returned home. We also had to get our individual cases and rucksacks packed, once we decided what clothes we needed to take, we would travel ‘relatively light’, using our aircraft cabin sized suitcases, rather than the much larger hold-all that we would normally take. We agreed that if we needed to use a launderette whilst on our travels, they were readily available in many of the local towns that we would stop at, or pass through, so we could always stop and have a cheeky Anti-Covid Vaccine 🍷 and perhaps even a Tapas lunch, whilst we waited for the laundry to be done 😉

We departed, on our ‘Adventure Into The Unknown’, on an unusually cloudy overcast Monday morning, although it was warm and already extremely humid, the clouds were actually a light brown in colour from the ‘Sahara Sand’ (Calima) suspended within them, the visibility over the mountains and sea were hazy and it must have rained during the early hours, as the car had the tell tale signs of the brown sand ridden rain spotted marks, so much for washing and waxing the car a day or so earlier 🙄 We had agreed that on this particular road trip we would explore the more North Eastern side of the Mediterranean Coast, between Valencia and Barcelona, and perhaps even venture to some of the more inland areas too, but we didn’t have any specific locations in mind to visit, other than our first two locations, we would just decide once we got nearer the end of that first week on which direction we would head towards next 🤷‍♂️ We had previously visited the cities of Valencia and Barcelona, although those were many year’s ago, back in our Motor homing days, but we had never actually done any of the coastline between those two locations, so that would be the area we would initially concentrate on.

We set ourselves an initial target of just getting out of our own Region of Andalusia and, being located almost at the South East corner of the Costa del Sol, that journey itself would take ‘at least’ four hours, dependent on how many stops we made en-route. So we planned for our first stop to be in the town of ‘Lorca’, located just a few kilometres over the Andalusia Northern boundary in the Region of ‘Murcia’. Although we had passed Lorca numerous times on previous journeys, it was a place that we had never actually stopped at and explored so, we decided on a two night stopover, it would be late afternoon by the time we arrived at our pre-booked hotel on our first travel day, so this would allow us the evening to just rest up and relax and then allow us the following full day to just do some sightseeing.

I elected to do the first part of the driving, it was a very familiar route to us so the landmarks we passed just served to make the journey appear a little longer, although I still found the landscapes to be pretty awesome. After getting away from the busy coastal traffic, after the first hour or so, once we had cleared the northern outskirts of Malaga, the land seemed to just expand its lungs, taking in the much cleaner and clearer mountain air and, it seemed to sigh with relief at the freedom to be able to stretch itself out and it opened up with grand views for miles around, mountains of green forested pines, hectares upon hectares of Olive groves, whitewashed mountain villages that made the perfect picture postcard views and near empty roads that stretched out in front of us like a gigantic elongated snake, the only thing missing from this near perfect view was the usual Spanish sunshine, although the outside temperature still registered 30 degrees(c) so we were certainly thankful for the efficiency of the car air-con system 🥵

The journey to Lorca actually ended up taking us five hour’s, although that was because we had four stops, only two were actually scheduled, the initial re-fuel of the car, as we departed home, then a lunch stop, after which Shazza took control of the steering wheel, however we also ended up having an unscheduled coffee break stop, just because we could, but then an additional comfort break stop, probably due to the extra unscheduled coffee stop 😂 But hey, we were on holiday now, so we were in no particular hurry, we had already pre-booked our hotel accommodation so we could just take our time 🤷‍♂️

Our hotel was located on a hilltop, within the grounds of ‘Lorca Castle’ and overlooking the large town below. The views from our room window, and elsewhere around the hotel, were absolutely stunning and we ate dinner that evening on the outer terrace of the Restaurant, it was so warm with just a slight breeze blowing and it was so quiet, no road noise, no dogs barking, no excitable or tired children, just the moonlight and the lights of the town below, it was as near perfect as it could get and the ideal way to commence our road trip.

The only minor issue was that unless you were a keen hill walker, or mountain goat, access to the town below was either by taxi (€10) or using our own car, I was happy to get reception to call for a taxi but Shazza said that she was happy to drive down the following morning. So that had been the plan, except that once we got back to our room and checked the weather forecast for that following day it appeared that the ‘Works of Fiction’ had other ideas 🙄 Heavy rain and thunder was forecast to commence from 07:00am, right through until the early evening so we agreed on a wet weather plan ! We decided that we would have a lazy start to the morning, then breakfast around 9:30am, followed by a session in the internally heated Spa swimming pool, which was ‘free’ to use, only the Spa treatments, if we chose to have any, would come at an additional charge, however, we both agreed that we had far too many wrinkles for one Spa treatment to resolve or have any noticeable impact, so we would perhaps give them a miss 🤭🤭 Then we would go and have a light lunch, followed by the mandatory Siesta, it would of course be rude not to, then in the evening, a nice Dinner and, just to round off our re-arranged day, we would watch the Serbia v England World Cup Qualifier match on our iPad, it was pointless getting frustrated at the weather, just another one of those many things in life that we had absolutely no control over 🤷‍♂️

Perhaps it was the ‘Dark Forces’ seeking their revenge on us, but because we had made yet another plan in readiness, it seemed that we were to thwart them once again. I awoke early and looked out of the large window, expecting to see dark storm clouds and even rain on the windows, so I got a pleasant surprise when my view was one of white clouds, with some patches of early morning blue sky. The hastily arranged wet weather programme was shelved and the original sightseeing plan re-instated.

We found a parking area right opposite the towns magnificent looking ‘Visitor Centre’, although it would only accept a single €1 coin which only gave us 90 minutes. Rather than do battle with the traffic in the very busy town to try and locate another car park that would offer longer stay parking, as it was only a ten minute walk into the centre we decided to do a preliminary reconnaissance and then, if it was worth staying longer we would return and feed the parking meter with another €1, which is exactly what we did, however, on our return visit to the pay machine, I observed that we could actually put €1.45 into the machine, the maximum permitted, and when the new ticket came out it gave us 4 hours 🤷‍♂️ strange, very strange, as it hadn’t shown the different rate earlier that day. However, we were not complaining as we had used up the first thirty-minutes of our original ticket having ‘Coffee and Tostado’s’ in the Plaza de Espana, so now we could just wander at our leisure.

Our usual habit is to obtain a street plan from the Tourist Information centre and use that as sort of guide to find our way around large towns, but more often than not we just do not refer to it and wander aimlessly discovering places for ourselves, and that is exactly what we did this time. As you my reader’s already know by now, neither of us are ‘History Buffs’ or ‘Shoppers’ we much prefer to wander down narrow streets, getting lost as we do so, but always managing to find our way back to where we had parked the car. Sometimes that may mean missing some significant or even unique tourist attractions in that particular town or city, but we can live with that, although often we find some interesting places too, and get to see the mix between the historical areas and the more modern parts, which in truth are often intermingled with each other anyway, and that was the case here in Lorca.

It was inevitable that eventually at some point in our wanderings, through the back streets and alleyways, that we would find ourselves in the more modern town centre, with all of the more usual high street stores, the crowds of people and the busy and very noisy traffic, our worst nightmare 😲 There were lots of historical buildings, churches and museums, most of which we didn’t bother entering but, if you were that way inclined, I would guess that you could spend two ‘full’ days here visiting them all, or if you were a ‘Shopper’, at least several hours wandering in and out of all the shops and of course, the usual array of ‘Tourist Tat’ retailers, but what surprised us here in Lorca were the high volume of street beggars, going around the Public Parks and Cafe’s with their palms open wide, not just the odd one or two but absolutely dozens of them, you could spend a fortune just giving everyone of them even just a handful of change, but which one’s do you give handout’s to and which do you choose not to 🤷‍♂️ We took the option to decline, politely of course, to not give anything to any of them, it seemed the only fair way. We found a nice side street cafe to have a snack lunch, of course with the obligatory beggar, who cannot have been that hungry as we did offer to buy him a coffee and sandwich, but he wanted ‘Dinero’ (Money), which we declined to provide him with. After resting our rapidly weary legs we commenced heading back towards where we had parked the car. Just as an aside, it seems worthy of a mention, the sky remained a bright blue, hardly a cloud in the sky all the time we were out and, the temperature at one point registered 32 degrees(c) 🥵 So much for the accuracy, once again, by the ‘Works of Fiction’, which still proves that the ‘Forrest Gump’ method is by far the best option. Our day finished on a high, another dinner taken on the lovely open terrace of the hotel and to wrap up our brief stay in Lorca, we sat and watched England, somewhat surprisingly, beat Serbia 5-0, the perfect end to a perfect day.

I do not know why we bother, but ahead of another long drive the following day, we still checked the ‘Works of Fiction’ forecast for our drive North, up along the coastline, and yet again it didn’t bode well 😳

I guess we will just have to wait and see what our ‘Forrest Gump’ forecast reflects in the morning 🤷‍♂️

Our journey continues ‘Onwards and Upwards’ so, until the next time……………

Hasta Luego mi Amigos, La Vida Es Buena