Moving east

 It is what we English would call summer here now. Every day is blue sky and hot and the nights are warmish. I think this is just because it’s warmer in the day and the ground warms up more and more and so doesn’t cool down as much as overnight. Shorts are the norm and maybe long sleeves after sunset  it depends on height and the mountains are quite cool. The temperature drops noticeably several degrees as soon as the sun sets.

Tarifa is apparently cooler than Barbate, half an hour up the coast on the way to Cape Trafalgar. I assume this is due to the expanse of cooler sea on three sides plus the wind that helps mix things up. In the direct sun it is quite hot, after all we are at 36 degrees longitude so it is intense.

We stayed the night on a not so typical motorhome halt, Area Caños de Meca. There are many of these, you can almost find them in every town and some villages. This one is different as it is more like a campsite on pebbles. It’s run by a great guy who lives next door - it’s his land. There’s 50 marked pitches, all with electric outlets. Also there are quality buildings with toilets and showers. Someone mans the entrance at a kiosk selling basics, from 09:00 to 22:00. Oh and the wifi, included in the €15, is so fast that my Speedtest went off the scale at over 200mb/s.

As it is Friday night the Spanish have come to Cape Trafalgar / Los Caños de Meca for the weekend, so as well as a few foreigners, there are many Spanish and quite a few have their children. We are a little squashed and sort of rely on each others’s good manners!

This large motorhome is being driven by a German guy on his own. I don’t know why.

Our neighbours on one side were rather close to us. I had a bit of a chat with their two young lads, just testing them a little on their English. They were young enough to be shy but still happy to try to chat.

We had a beer at a beach bar and watched the kite surfers. Past the lighthouse we lay on the beach and watched the way the waves came in and washed out again. It looked weird and the Lonely Planet confirmed that swimming isn’t ‘allowed’ due to currents. The sand was deep and steep and made it hard to get out after a full body immersion. No swimming though.

Photo makes its look perfectly ok!

We topped up supplies at a Lidl but struggled to leave (we are 2.6m).

Then we drove east back into the ‘hills’ of Andalucia. It is hard to relate just how mountainous this region is and how many hairpins and very steep roads we have driven. There’s nothing to compare in the UK. It’s a real driving experience.

The views and the mountain villages are just great. 

Lunch was taken at the entrance to a lovely mountain dwelling that appeared to be deserted but probably wasn’t. Why do they need the signs across the road. Is there so much trouble with boundaries?

We are often heading for a location that has offered coordinates; this might be on ‘Search for Sites’ or ‘Park4night’. We are now used to entering numbers like 35.1234,-5.6789 This makes the use of satnav such as Google Maps, fool-proof. That’s what usually happens.

This afternoon we confidently arrived at a village and engaged low gear to go up a steep backstreet, as the destination was advertised as 700m from the main road. The fact that this wasn’t a main road didn’t alert us to a typo in the numbers. “You have reached your destination” coincided with the end of a very rough track and there were no expected signs for the Casa where we would be camping.

After a re-type of the correct coordinates, checks showed that the site was a few minutes away downhill. We set off, as Google suggested, down a gravel track, that got narrow and steep. Low ratio gears were selected and we ploughed on regardless, joineding a slightly better road at a nice villa. This was not our destination, as the blank looks were a giveaway. We established that ours was just below but it needed a further detour before we finally rolled-up. Good job it’s a Land Rover.

That night the weather was predictable and I woke up to capture a pic of the lunar eclipse. What a great sight it was although not very good on the iPhone camera but perfectly acceptable!