7th December 2016. Benidorm, Spain

Today was our last day with Steve and Jane in Benidorm, they are flying home tomorrow (we’re not sure they originally intended flying home so soon but that’s the effect we tend to have on people!).

We left our respective campsites for the last time and drove up to a road where they have ‘wild camped’ a few times before, we amazed ourselves by getting there before them (they turned up hours later having not been able to find anywhere else to wild camp!  Just kidding, or are we!).

Jane had ideas of where she wanted to take us on their last day.  They kindly detoured from their route to let me take some photos of Neptune’s night club where they film parts of the comedy programme Benidorm.

We stopped for coffee along the sea front where the waitress dropped the sugar and biscuit on the table then Jane knocked the coffee cup as the poor woman tried to put the cup on the table.  She apologised profusely and scurried off to get a cloth to clean up the spilt coffee.  We’d hoped to order some cake but the waitress refused to look our way so we carried on with Jane’s plan which was to walk along the sea front up to El Castelle to sit in the sun with a beer.

We had a slight change of plan in that Jane and I had a jug of Sangria, it was the healthy option, it had fruit in it!  We had more tostada de tomate to keep us going until dinner time and we watched the sun set over the bay, it was beautiful.

Jane and Steve had planned to go to a Thai restaurant called The Red Apple for dinner and they’d kindly invited us to join them.  The food was gorgeous and nothing was too much trouble for the waiters, they both made us feel very welcome.

We all walked back to our vans feeling very sad that they were going tomorrow.  Jane said she didn’t want to leave and they assured us that they’d thoroughly enjoyed the time we’d all spent together in Benidorm.  We stopped off at a China shop to pick up a couple of items (I managed to know over some buckets with my bag, and beat a hasty retreat after I’d restacked them!) then went into Iceland to get some eggs. We didn’t bother getting a basket because that’s all we needed until we discovered they sold Quorn amongst other things.  An assistant spotted us with our armfuls of stuff and asked whether he could get us a basket (he then knocked over a load of tins as he brought it over to us, whoops!).  With our basket of items we went and queued behind a couple who were standing by the till but the checkout lady called us over to the till (apparently they were just browsing) she asked us whether we realised why she’d spoken to us in English and when we said we didn’t she told us she knew we were British immediately when she saw us queuing behind the other couple!  Hee!  Hee!

Which reminds me of a story about our oldest son Morgan.  We’d been to a gig and we’d parked in an outside car park beside a multistory car park.  We walked past a long queue of people waiting to validate their parking tickets to get out of the multistory and then realised we’d lost Morgan.  We walked back and discovered him standing in the queue!  When we asked why he laughed and said he’d joined the queue without actually acknowledging that we weren’t in that car park.  Very British!

We’re so grateful to Jane and Steve for inviting us to spend so much time with them, we’ve had such a wonderful time and enjoyed Benidorm so much that we decided to stay on an extra day.

I suppose we shouldn’t really be surprised that we’ve enjoyed it so much both Jane and Steve had assured us we would and Kathryn and Alex were adamant that we’d love it.  You were all quite correct.