23/6 – Bonfires on the Beach!

This weekend Liesl’s Aunt and Uncle (June and Alan – although Liesl still calls them Uncle Alan and Auntie June – bless!) visited us for a few days whilst they were already on their month long holiday touring Spain – very nice.

They kindly took us for a meal in Santa Pola, we ate late as we wanted to co-inside it with a “Summer Salstace” festival held by the locals where they take bits of wood (palets etc) down to the beach around midnight and set fire to them, making hundereds of small bonfires along the coast, the pictures from my phone really dont do it justice, it was really a sight to see.

As its starting to ramp up to the “really warm” weather – as opposed to what has become usual 20-30 degrees every day and sunny weather, all manner of new bars and resturants have started to pop up in places that we never even knew existed! These bars seem to be temporary things that just get put up in the summer, we have certainly never seen them before and they must be trusting that the weather is fine because they would get washed away if anything drastic happened!

One of the new outside bars has popped up in the grounds of the health centre / library just down the road from our apartment, its very temporary but has about 10 tables outside and seems always to be full of punters – its really quite amazing how these places seem to lay dormant and invisible during the winter months and come to life during the summer!

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15/6 – Camping in the Campo!

Yep, this weekend Liesl and I decided to try out our new tent, one that we bought for the princely sum of 99€ last weekend in Aldi (yes Dave we went into Aldi, you may need to go and have a lay down now I know!)

The tent (tienda in Spanish) preports to sleep 6-8 people, however I think that must be based on the size of Spaniards and not well fed middle aged Brits, but either way its plenty big enough for Liesl, Hetty and I to sleep in relative comfort (well as confortable as you get in a tent anyway).

Helpfully the instructions for putting together this 3d jigsaw puzzle were clearly translated from Chineese to Spanish without any helpful pictures so they went out the window straight away, in the end it only (lol, only) took us 2 hours to put up the tent – we even managed not to fall out over it so our relationship is clearly much better than it was in the UK – lol.

We picked a site about 1.5 hours inland – near Alcoy in Valencia, it was pretty much in the middle of nowhere in a country park – http://www.campingmariola.com/ingles/ser.htm the views were great.

A friend of ours, Janice, who has recently opened a travel agents here in Gran Alacant advised us to ensure that we took something warm to wear as we were going to a beautiful place that happened to be in the mountains and therefore it was much cooler there, I of course took little notice as I was sitting on my terrace, sweating in my tee-shirt and shorts in 40+ degrees sunshine. She, of course, was right, by the early hours of the morning it was really cold – I mean brass monkeys cold! Next time, if we venture into the mountains we shall be taking warmer clothing – I guess I started to regret my decision not to take warmer clothing when we were almost at the camp site and I could see the “Warning Snow” signs!!!!

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