Our plans were simple and revolved around food. Day one in Valencia - we headed to Platja de Cabanyal, a beach area to the north of Valencia port.
We weren't interested in the beach which is somewhat bleak, we wanted to revisit 'La Cabinyata', a small tapas restaurant tucked away amongst the grid of half abandoned modernista warehouses behind the promenade.
It's a modest looking place and the menu is nothing special. What it does is serve up Spanish tapas classics exactly how they should be, and that is not always the case.
Returning to a restaurant that you remember fondly is to court disappointment. Are things ever quite so good as you remember them? Well sometimes they are, and what we had at La Cabinyata this time proved to be just as delicious as before. We chose two tapas dishes to share and finished with a pud.
The tuna ceviche salad was good, but not so delicious that we might still be talking about it days later.
However the croquettes were definitely memorable..
.
Gill worked in professional kitchens in her youth so knows about the complex processes involved to make a commonplace dish outstanding. To get the perfect balance of squish and crunch in a croquettes involves heating and cooling the bechamel a number of times and split second accuracy in the fryer.
These had been cooked to perfection, had real depth of flavour and the velvety filling enlivened by tiny shards of red pepper and leeks. They were delicious. Would they achieve 'food memory' status - the private roll call we have of stunning dishes we have eaten over the years that we can still recall?
Our pud was pretty good too - a cheesecake drenched with an oozy chocolate ganache covered in chopped pistachio nuts - yum! Gill greeted it's arrival with enthusiasm....
The last time we were here the place had been quiet mid-week. It was almost full today, I guess this is to be expected, the place has a 4.7 score on Google Maps and in TripAdvisor squeezes into the top 10% of places to eat in Valencia - which is a very foodie city with over 4000 restaurants listed.
Other small delights included discovering that the locally brewed Turia 'tostada' beer was delicious and having a group of very affable Italians sitting next to us added further sparkle to the experience.
On the whole you don't come across many Italians touring around Spain. Valencia seems to be an exception. As well as in the restaurant, there were at least half a dozen Italian mohos staying at Valencia Camper Park. It could be Valencia's beautiful architecture that attracts them, but equally it might well be the food scene. Is Valencia Spain's Bologna, we speculated.
Getting to from Valencia Camper Park to 'La Cabinyata' took a little planning. The motorhome aires is well connected to the city but the station nearest to it is the second to last one on the line so it takes 30 minutes or so to reach the city centre.
The restaurant was at the end of a tram line running south from the centre so you have to change from train to tram. Overall the journey takes about an hour and a half once you factor-in connection times.
Going was ok, but our return coincided with the end of Spain's long lunch break around 3.30pm. The metro platforms and the trains themselves were rammed reaching Tokyo levels of human sardineness.
Our plan for the following day was more straightforward - jump back on the metro and have lunch at Valencia Market's Central Bar - definitely a place of many 'food memories' for us. It shouldn't be possible to become hopelessly nostalgic about a de-constructed carrot cake, but we still reminisce about the one we had here in November 2016.
Richard Camarena, a Valencian Michelin starred chef, opened his market bar in 2012. It was groundbreaking at the time, elevating the workaday market bar with a more ambitious take on tapas that utilised the cornucopia of fresh ingredients available at Valencia's enormous central market.
I guess the development should be seen in relation to the zero kms. food movement that asserted the local over the global. Sadly over recent years the trend has reversed. Amazon can deliver more or less any ingredient on the planet to your door within a day. I don't see that as progress.
We first came across Central Market Bar in 2014 and have revisited it regularly since then. It hasn't changed aside from becoming ever more popular. However it looks as if there are new developments afoot.
One half of the bar has been closed and an area adjacent to the place was fenced-off pending new developments. After fourteen years I guess refurbishment is necessary, the basic set-up and decor has not changed at all since it opened.
The downside was that extra bar stools had been squeezed into the half of the bar that was still functioning. We were squashed into a corner that had been repurposed as a seating area by hooking a precarious stainless steel extension into the end of the bar. The food was as good as ever, but it wasn't a relaxing experience
Like yesterday we stuck to Spanish lunchtime classics....
like patatas bravas..
... and meatballs, simple but delicious,
...and yet another take on a chocolate cake, a less oozy affair than yesterday's, but formidable in its depth of flavour.
It's likely we will be back in Valencia in February, will Central Bar's refurbishment be complete by then? I am sure we will be back to check.
The weather has changed after weeks of wall to wall blue and temperatures in the mid-thirties. It's still as hot as ever but somewhat more unsettled with chunky fronts bringing stormy weather to the north of Spain and the Mediterranean coast becoming showery.
Last night we we were woken by thunder and lightning at about three in the morning. This was followed by a downpour. By the time I'd hopped out of bed to close the skylights there were puddles inside the van. If the combination of showers and extreme heat persists it's going to make life tricky as we won't be able ventilate the interior by fully opening the skylight. As it stands the inside of the van is not dropping below the mid twenties overnight making it uncomfortable to sleep.
It seems dryer to the south of us, we've decided to head towards Mazarron. If the weather is more settled there we'll stay for a while at Camping Madrilles at Isla Plana. If the forecast remains rainy we'll push on further to the Capo de Gata. Hopefully in the next ten days the weather will settle down in the north because we do need to start heading towards Santander by mid October; our ferry is on the 25th.