5th February 2017. Los Millares and Almeria, Spain.
What a TERRIBLE night, I think everyone suffered last night it was so windy I felt certain the van was going to blow over. We decided to move on today and I went into the office to pay. While I was there I thanked the owner for our stay because the site was so clean and organised and the showers were FANTASTIC. She was very pleased that we’d liked their aire and went on to comment about the terrible weather at which point the German lady who’d been sitting chatting to her when I went in told me she hadn’t been able to sleep all night but her little dog had remained sparko all night, lucky little devil!
We drove in a bit of a sleep deprived daze from Cabo de Gata to the Copper Age village at Los Millares up in the mountains.
It had been a hard slog trying to find out where this was located but Darren was under the impression he had found the co-ordinates (on the official web site, I might add) and put them in the SAT NAV however he was mistaken! He followed the directions it gave him and we ended up driving down a road which became narrower and narrower. We saw some beautiful houses along the way but when we came to a shepherd and his flock wandering about at the side of the road and saw the road not only get narrower still but start to go up hill Darren decided that was definitely the time to turn round and go back.
He manoeuvred the van beautifully and drove back the way we’d come stopping when the road widened to try to find out where Los Millares was. At that moment there was a knock on the window and we looked out to see the jogger that we’d passed 3 times along the road. He was so kind, he asked in pigeon English whether we were looking for the camp site, we then had to explain in pigeon Spanish that we were looking for the Copper Age village. He looked at us in complete confusion until Darren suddenly remembered the name of the place (well he remembered something similar enough to the name of the place for the man to understand him, correct him and then give him detailed directions) It turned out that the village was actually on the opposite side of the Rambla that we’d been driving along side. It only took us 5 minutes to get there once we’d returned to the main road, simple when you know how.
We were the first people to arrive at the village. A lady gave Darren directions again in pigeon English, he was told there were two paths, one taking us to a reconstructed Copper Age village and the other longer path taking us to the ruins of the actual village however he wasn’t sure whether she was telling him it would take us an hour to walk to the site down the longest path and an hour back or half an hour each way, the other path was going to take either 15 minutes to get to the reconstructed Copper Age village and 15 minutes back or it was going to take 30 minutes, we didn’t have a problem with that but to add to the excitement we had to get back to the gate before 2 p.m. which is when she was shutting the gate and after that we’d have to climb over the high wire fence! We decided to take the shortest path first to give us a clue as to how long we could take exploring the two sites. We needn’t have worried we actually had loads of time, it took us 2 hours to walk round and that included a quick change of clothes into something cooler in the van after we’d walked back from the reconstructed village, it had been freezing in the morning and then it was baking by midday. When we’d explored both sections we spent some time in the museum but as that was outside the gate we had no worries.
We thoroughly enjoyed the visit, it was so peaceful at the reconstructed village that we could hear the bees buzzing from flower to flower, by the time we walked down to the ruins four other people had arrived. The view of the mountains, some of them snow capped was stunning and there were carpets of yellow flowers covering the ground around the stone walls of the ruins. We had a momentary bit of excitement when we saw huge plumes of smoke in the distance and what looked like scorched trees but after checking it out for a short while we decided the fire was actually under control.
We left Los Millares and drove to Almeria
We found a car park full of other motorhomes and parked with them, after yet another change of clothes, it was even hotter than earlier, we wandered down to the sea front. As we walked out of the car park we were hit by the howling wind, wearing a Summer dress turned out not to be the best idea I’d ever had, there were a few Marilyn Munroe moments although unfortunately I have neither her money nor her figure and I was rather chilly and windswept by the time we found a cafe on the promenade to have lunch in however after 10 minutes of sitting in the cafe I was dripping with sweat, I can’t imagine how the rest of the customers were managing to stay in the restaurant without passing out, they were wearing Winter clothes, some had coats on and they all had jumpers on!
After we’d left the restaurant we sat and watched a surfer trying his hardest to paddle through the waves in order to start surfing, we must have watched him for at least 30 minutes and I couldn’t bear to see his suffering in the end so I dragged Darren away and we sat further along the beach watching a man kite surfing.
We walked the short distance back to the van which unfortunately took us past the roundabout which had a statue of a mermaid on it and I couldn’t drag myself and my camera away from it. We’ve passed that roundabout a number of times since our boys came out at Christmas and each time I have ended up obsessively photographing the mermaid. When Darren finally managed to get me away from it we had a little wander round the car park where our van was parked to see how many UK registered vans there were and low and behold there was Steve and Jane’s van! Not long after we got back into the van there was a knock on the door and there they were! We had a nice chat about what we’d all been up to during the day, it was good to catch up with the gossip.
