21st November 2016. Valencia, Spain.

The dogs were quiet last night, they had a mad howling session early in the evening and then nothing until about 8 a.m. Even the cockerills had a lay in, a lone cockerill did his funky stuff at 4 a.m. and that was it, thank goodness.

Jane and Steve popped over to the van around 9 ish this morning to say goodbye before they moved on, we were very impressed that they’d managed to get moving so early after such a late night, I was halfway through washing my hair so they were greeted by the sight of the wild woman of Borneo with dripping hair.  I hope we get to meet up with them again on this trip, hopefully if we’re quick enough we can get to Benidorm before they leave.

Lynn’s Darren knocked a while later to see whether we’d still be there when he got back from shopping, we were still faffing around as we said we would.  When he got back later we went over to say goodbye and Lynn made the mistake of asking us in.  I did warn her that we were more likely to leave quickly if we were standing on the doorstep but she insisted so we went in and sat down!  Fatal!  We ended up chatting for an hour and a half.  After I’d pestered for long enough Darren wrote down a list of nice places that they’d visited along the coast, Lynn hadn’t wanted to impose their ideas on us but we have no idea of what is further along the coast so any suggestions are extremely useful.

We’re hoping to meet up with them again further down the coast, it’s something to look forward to.

We left the aire that we’d had such great fun at for 3 nights (which wasn’t bad considering we had originally only intended staying for one night) and drove to an aire just outside Valencia en route to visiting our friend Beki in a couple of days time, I’m really looking forward to seeing her, her family and her new Spanish home it’s such an unexpected surprise finding out that she lives over here now, if I hadn’t popped on to Facebook for  the first time in months I would never have known so it seems that sometimes Facebook is actually worth having after all.

We passed a field of mandarin trees on the journey down but the strange thing was that the top of every tree had been cut off and the branchy bit that had all the mandarins on it lay on the ground in front of the beheaded trunk, we couldn’t decide whether it was an act of vandalism or whether they do that every so often for some horticultural reason, we haven’t seen that in any other field.

We noticed an advert on the back of a lorry for sandwich sellers dresses!

When we arrived near the area we were staying we waited at the roundabout while a huge German registered motorhome drove past, we followed along behind him assuming he was going to the aire we were going to, it seems he was and that he’d had the same dodgy co-ordinates as we had because we all saw the locked up gate and carried on going to the next small roundabout where he swung his motorhome back the way we’d just come.  We gave him a ‘where the hell are we’ look as he faced us and he gestured to us to follow him which we did until we came to some traffic lights that turned red as we got to them and we lost sight of him.  We were nearing the first roundabout we’d come in on when I noticed his motorhome as we passed some open gates, he was parked by the reception building and was waving at us to come inside, that was very kind of him because there’s every likelyhood we’d have missed it (and blamed the SAT NAV again obviously).  Luckily there were no other cars on the road so Darren reversed back and pulled into the aire behind him.   It’s a nice little aire and the lady on reception was very helpful.

We’re going into Valencia tomorrow, for the rest of today we’re going to chill out and do very little.   I’m hoping that the dogs haven’t hitched a lift in our van again so we can have a quiet night tonight.