6th December 2016. Benidorm, Spain.

We awoke to a nice day which looked promising for our walk but at the time we were all due to leave our vans it poured with rain, luckily, in the words of my Mother and British Rail, we were all ‘running late’ (a phrase my Mum used to use a lot which used to entertain my father-in-law Malcolm no end!) so we missed a good soaking and finally met at the traffic lights in blazing sunshine.

As ever we were well prepared, oh hang on no we weren’t but as luck would have it Jane and Steve seemed to be on our wave length and they had no idea where the path up to the cross was either so the 4 of us bumbled along using the map on Darren’s phone to try to find it.  It occurred to me as we were wandering along that Darren and I could have popped into the Tourist Information Office before we left the site to get a map, but hindsight is a great thing.

We eventually found what we thought was the beginning of the road up to the cross, it was certainly going uphill.  I had thought it would be a footpath up the hillside, joining up with a road at some point because the waitress from the site restaurant had told us there was a café halfway up the ‘mountain’ which turned out to be a myth, we certainly never found it!

We walked a long way uphill and were rewarded with glimpses of the sparkling blue sea through the highrise buildings.  I was going to take some photos through the chain link fence but Jane came up with the idea that if I climbed on the metal ‘seat’ I could take a photo over the top of the fence, it was a brilliant vantage point.  I was slightly worried that it might be an electric fence but Jane said she knew it wasn’t because she’d already touched it.  Thanks Jane, lol!

We carried on to the top of the hill and came to a roundabout where we ummed and ahhed about whether to walk up what looked like a footpath or carry on up the road, we chose the road but were rather disconcerted to find that it then wound it’s way back down again, NOOOOOO!  In the distance we could see roads winding round the ‘mountain’ at various levels but they appeared to be heading away from the cross so we weren’t sure whether we had to walk round the ‘mountain’ before we could begin to go up again, the question was which one to take!

We discovered the answer when we came to a roundabout at the bottom of the road and saw a few people looking out at the view further up another road.

The houses built along the mountain side were all beautifully designed, one had been made to look like a boat.  We were noticed a load of houses that were half built, the thing that caught our eye was the large retaining wall which had a number of blocks of colour painted on them, each one numbered, Darren pointed out they must have used tins of paint as their Matchpots!

It was well worth the walk up to the cross, I’m so glad that Jane had mentioned it.  The views out over the sea and across Benidorm and beyond were stunning especially when a rainbow appeared in the distance.

The walk back down to the town was much quicker and as we had been unable to find the illusive (possibly imaginary) café on the journey up we made our way to the sea front for coffee.