28th November 2016. Javea, Spain.
I decided to do the last of our washing today and stripped the bed, which would have been fine except I thought as the washing machine and tumble dryer were large ones I’d wash the mattress protector too! BIG mistake!
Although it definitely says the mattress protector can be put in a washing machine it seems that as soon as water is added to the equation it becomes very heavy and the washing machine really doesn’t like it (if I’d had a brain I would have figured that out beforehand). It made the machine vibrate across the floor and refuse to spin, a little sign came up saying it was unbalanced so I ended up with a load of very wet washing when it had finished its cycle. Unfortunately I didn’t realise THAT was the reason until the receptionist had given me a 2nd token to find out why the machine wasn’t working properly, we’d assumed that someone had turned the machine off the first time before it had had chance to spin so I washed it for a 2nd time only this time I kept popping out to monitor it’s progress and I was there to see the sign appear and the drum just turn slowly round while the machine tried to work out what it was going to do, it indicated that there were 7 minutes left to the end of the programme but it had stopped counting down and was still displaying 7 minutes when I returned with Darren, DON’T PANIC, DON’T PANIC!
We thought we’d broken the machine. We were racking our brains over what could we do to rectify the situation when the machine suddenly turned itself off and the door unlocked, PHEW! On the plus side however I now know that my little spinner can actually accommodate a duvet cover!
We left it quite late before we went to explore Javea, we eventually forced ourselves to leave the van around 5 p.m. to walk down to the beach.
We had a nice but rather slippery walk along the damp promenade (glazed tiled floors and rain don’t make for a good combination), watching the waves battering the sea wall, the sea was so rough it kept pushing one of the drain covers up as it hurtled in under the walkway.
It was dark as we started looking for somewhere to eat but nothing grabbed my fancy, the vegetarian options were pasta or pizza, and I’ve had my fill of those for the time being, I wanted a plate FULL of vegetables (even Darren was craving them, [yes it’s true, unbelievable I know but true never the less!]) and they seemed to be few and far between on the menus, 2 peppers on a plate doesn’t constitute a helping of vegetables in my opinion.
We decided to go and make some food back at the van but as we made our way back to the van it started to pour with rain JUST as we were passing a posh cake shop! Naturally we HAD to take shelter in the warm inviting shop and it would have been rude not to have had a coffee and obviously when you have coffee you’ve got to have something to go with it so I ended up having tomatoes on a baguette and Darren had a baguette with tomatoes and tuna and of course we had to try one of the speciality coffees rather than our usual black coffee, Darren had a Bonbom, espresso with condensed milk, and I had a carajillo, espresso with brandy which we then combined because Darren’s was very sweet and mine was very alcoholic but mixed together in the words of Goldilocks it was just right.
They had lots of very nice looking cakes so we bought 2 to take back to the van with us (so much for craving vegetables, does a raspberry cake count?). The rain had conveniently stopped for our walk back and instead of making a healthy meal when we got back we sat and read and ate our cakes, how contrary!