Wednesday 18 January 2017

Benidorm to Vera - 169 miles 

More rain during the latter part of the night, disturbed again by Jamie, but by getting up time it had stopped although it was still grey, damp and cold. Breakfast, packed up and serviced we just had to call in at reception to see how much electricity we'd used – a lot more than we expected but whilst I have an inbuilt distrust of metering systems we had used it for heating quite a lot. The lesson is, gas is MUCH cheaper than electricity so unless it's included in the site fee in future, we'll use gas only for our heating needs.

Isn't it interesting how folk are very happy to stop and chat just as you are leaving, but completely ignore you for the four days you've been on site?

Once on the road, our target was south towards Almeria but first we needed a supermarket. Found a Carrefour at Elche where supplies were refurbished. Once we'd finished it was lunchtime so stayed in the car park. We have to be a bit careful with some of these car parks because many of them have covered spaces, far too low for us and they stick out, especially at the row end where there is a danger of causing quite serious damage to Bertie.

Away around 2.30 pm and it was raining. Joined the A7 autovia and the rain started turning to snow, despite the road not climbing at all, eventually becoming quite heavy. Fortunately the gritters had been out so the road surface was only wet and we were not really slowed down much. Past Murcia the road up to Granada had been closed to trux by the police so it's obviously much worse there. Very shortly after it turned back to rain thank goodness.

It was obvious we were not going to make Almeria today so we paused at a service station to check the maps. We spotted an aire about half an hour away which looked fine, at Vera, so set TomTom and headed off. However the driving instructions seemed to be at odds with the satnav so we followed them instead and found them to be spot on. TomTom would have had us on the wrong side of the motorway. The site is actually quite close to the A7 (it overlooks it) but it is a fairly circuitous route, driving through lots of, well, nothing – until of course we met a lorry almost blocking the road. Just managed to squeeze past and found the aire on the side and top of a hill. Modern, clean with all facilities including electric (in with the price!) and free wifi, all for €9 which we thought very good. We later noticed, however that we didn't get many amps, the fridge kept cutting out, so we went onto gas for heating.

Commercial aire at Vera Tennis Club

So now we're settled for the evening; thinking it had stopped raining Terry took Jamie out for his evening walk – to find it was actually snowing instead! Not much, and very wet, this could be interesting tomorrow especially getting back down the hill!