24th January 2017. San Juan de los Terreros, Spain.

I got up this morning to photograph the sunrise then came in for breakfast.

Not long after we’d made coffee there was a toot from a car and I said “Ooh, bread van” (I’ve been trained like Pavlov’s dog so if I hear a car toot its horn in the morning I assume it’s a bread van!) when I looked out of the window there was a little white van and I could see loaves in the back! I’m such a saddo that I became very excited when I saw it, bouncing around like Tigger!  What enterprising ladies.  Who’d have believed that such a simple thing could make me so happy.  It was a great surprise and it became even greater when the lady opened the back of the van to reveal a vast array of cakes and bread, the Spanish vans we’ve seen previously occasionally have a couple of croissants as well as a couple of different types of bread so this was most unexpected.  The mystery was soon solved when the lady told me she was German, hence all the wonderful goodies in the van.

Darren tried to wake Jane and Steve but to no avail (he did the British quiet knock that you’d only hear if you were awake so as not to disturb them if they were sleeping, what he SHOULD have done was the Kiwi knock that our New Zealander neighbour Colin did in Marstrand that was SO loud it almost knocked us out of bed but it certainly got our attention, no faffing about there!) so we bought them some bread too and Darren took it round to them when they woke up.  Steve told us later that he’d heard the tap on the door but he’d assumed it was the owner of the bread van so he’d ignored it on principle.

We arranged to walk up to the next bay but we started talking to our neighbours and then a young couple who were hiking past with their two dogs popped over to see whether we could fill their bottle with water. The upshot of that was our neighbour Steve gave them some water and then we all sat and had coffee and biscuits.  The young couple were very interesting, Gabriella told us she comes from Italy, she was full of life and was bursting with energy.  She was tiny but carried a HUGE backpack which was almost as big as her.  Paulo said he was from Argentina, he told us Gabriella’s backpack was getting heavier every day because she kept buying presents for her family! Their dogs were very cute and so well behaved, the female was very cuddly and kept leaning against Steve for cuddles! Paulo told us about a beautiful bay further along the coast called Las Negras and he recommended we walk to the bay next to that which was also beautiful.  When they’d finished their coffee and cigarette and Gabriella had filled up with biscuits (it was lovely to see her excitement when she saw the biscuits) they thanked us, posed for some photos at our request and set off on their journey.

We took that cue as the moment to go for the walk we’d been going to do earlier.  Judy came with us too so we had a nice little walking group going there.  We had a nice walk along the beach but as we turned the corner into a little bay we came to a stream which was too deep to walk across in our shoes and as we didn’t have a towel to dry our feet we decided to retrace our tracks to the road and carry on along there.

On our walk to the rock ‘sculptures’ we passed some pretty areas beside the sea with a few vans parked there.  The area with the rock ‘sculptures’ was full to bursting with motorhomes, it was a very pretty bay but luckily we preferred the area we’d parked in.

On our way back to our vans we were followed by a pretty little black dog with a name tag on his collar, we don’t know where he had come from but he hung around the vans for a while before going back home.

We ate with Steve and Jane in the evening, Steve had made a vegetable curry and it was gorgeous.  We had another lovely evening chatting with them and after we’d gone back to our van we took advantage of the clear dark night to watch the stars, I was thrilled because that’s the first place we’ve been to on this trip where there weren’t any lights so we could see millions of stars.  We stopped at loads of places in Norway where there were no lights but unfortunately the sky was light all night so still no stars!  We looked at the little patches of blur in the sky through binoculars as our friend Stu had taught us and they turned into patches of bright stars shining in the night sky.  We even found Sirius flashing multicoloured at us, I love watching that.  Eventually the sky started clouding over so we went indoors and off to bed.