30th December 2016. Las Marinas, Spain.

The boys were flying home this afternoon so we went to Almeria to show them around.  We ended up driving round the narrow streets of the old town, so much more enjoyable in a tiny car, couldn’t find anywhere to park and went further along the coast to another town where we walked along the promenade and stopped for lunch beside the sea.

We watched two little dogs race towards the shop behind us, they hurtled inside then kept popping back out to see where their owners were and barking as if to say “hurry up!”  When their owners finally caught up with them they went into the café next door to us and minutes later the two little dogs began having a fine old time playing with a plastic water bottle on the promenade, they were racing backwards and forwards along the pavement each trying to take ownership of the bottle until their owner decided they were going to get run over by a bike if they carried on and she took them indoors.

Morgan was nervous that they might miss the plane so we dropped them at the airport an hour before they were due to go.  I hated seeing them walk into the airport, it’s going to be such a long time before we see them both again.

We had had a little drive around with the hire car on the way back to Las Marinas before we took it back, we drove along the coast road instead of the main road and it was beautiful, I wish we’d done that when the boys were with us.

As we drove out of Aguadulce we discovered there was a lovely area on the outskirts of Roquetas de Mar where lots of vans were wild camping so Darren went over to the only UK registered van and asked the man in it whether they had found it  OK to park there.  He said that he and his wife had been there for a week and a half so they reckoned it was fine.  As a consequence we decided we would take the van down there tomorrow and explore that area.

Unfortunately we got a message from our sons just after we’d dropped the hire car back saying that they’d been delayed.  The delay extended to  4 and half hours, 1 and a half of those was while they were sitting on the plane so although they should have got back home by 6 p.m. they didn’t get home until midnight, what a rotten end to a holiday.

Rather than drive back down to where wild camped at the beginning of our stay in Las Marinas we slept in the van parked in the road outside the apartment.  Having stopped for coffee and cake on the way back