Pals to l'Ametlla de Mar

29th October

166 miles

It rained overnight, it seems ages ago since we had any, but I guess it must have been in Sommelier, which is probably not even a fortnight ago. Lying in snug in bed with the rain drumming on the roof somehow you feel about nine years old and camped out in den. This lifestyle is very good for winding back the years, I don't really feel middle aged, and the thought of Gill hitting 60 next week seems almost ludicrous.

We were heading south before 10 o'clock, and decided to take the main road towards Barcelona rather than the motorway. It snaked through an interesting landscape of low hills and wooded valleys. As I said the other day the northern part is Catalonia is an odd mixture. One moment you can be looking at hills covered in forests of umbrella pines, unmistakably Mediterranean, then you turn a corner and see a line of pale, leafless poplars with a ploughed field beyond, which looks like the Loire; it is a landscape of  transition between north and south.

 A few miles before Barcelona we took the motorway and carried on through the urban sprawl all the way past Tarragona. It was not comfortable driving. Maisy is best at around 55mph, that's a bit slower than most trucks, so constantly we were buffeted by overtaking artics.

The factory next the road looked straight out of H. G. Wells

The motorway near Barcelona. it looks benign enough, but you can't see the wall of Polish trucks bearing down upon us in the rear view mirror.

A brutalist monument to cheer up the lay-by

Storm clouds over the mountains just south of Tarragona

The area we were heading too is a small, fairly undeveloped stretch of coast just north of the Ebro delta near l'Ametlla de Mar. It's an area we are familiar with as we've rented houses near there a few years ago. Although we vowed to visit as many new places as possible this trip, sometimes it's good to revisit old haunts too. Anyway the campsite at l'Ametlla is one of the few which is open this late in the season.

When I say the coast is fairly undeveloped, that's a relative term. Really outside of protected area very little of Western Europe' s Mediterranean coastline is not built up. It's not just tourism, the coastal strip is highly populated and parts of it industrialised. Here for example, though the campsite is next to two beautiful coves and set amongst olive groves, traffic noise from the AP7 motorway is pretty well constant, and the mainline railway between Barcelona and Valencia runs about 300 metres from the site entrance. Tonight at dusk, even thought its late November a lone cicada was rattling away in the bushes. Not even the traffic noise could quite drown out its  high pitched whirring call.

The small cove beside the campsite

with ochre coloured tufa-like rocks

Put Gill next to an olive tree, and she will take its photograph....

ta-dah!

the scent of pine and aromatic herbs beside a warm blue sea - irresistible!

It was warm enough to BBQ - the Catalan sausages we bought in France were very good - more herby than spicy. We had a drop of Cotes de Roussillon to finish, and polished off the 2008 Penedes we bought en-route. Interesting to compare French and Spanish Catalan wines; the Spanish was less strong, at 12.5 degrees, smoother, but complex; maybe the fact that it was six years old softened it. Most of the French wine we have been drinking has been two or three years old, and though velvety and complex, still has an adolescent edge to it.

a particularly scrummy red

dispatched with assistance....

Pals

28th October.

Camping Mas Patoxas is one of a handful of sites still open on the Costa Brava. Open is a relative term, apart from the sanitary block and reception, every thing else has a Morecambe in November end of season feel. This may be a good thing as in August the place must be a nightmare. It's as charmless as you get, serried ranks of mobiles and camping chalets set out on straight gravel terraces with shade provided by identically pollard stumpy plane trees. 

identical chalets

tarmac pitches

Our impression of the place was not helped by it being now the pollarding  season. A gang of men was slowly butchering the avenue of trees at the entrance. In order to relieve the boredom and drown out the cacophony of screaming chain saws the site P.A. drummed out thudding Euro dance music of the most moronic kind.

tree butchery

chain saws and thumping trance!

In order to escape it we pedalled into the nearby village of Pals, which is old, winding, and beautifully restored.

Quaint medieval streets

thoughtfully placed old pots

narrow alleys with a vista towards the countryside

Bougainvillea draped facades

We returned to the van for lunch, then got straight back onto our bikes afterwards and headed back to the village, for as soon we had finished  lunch so did the tree butchers and the Euro pop wall of noise  switched back on. To our amazement Pals was still as old winding and beautiful as it had been two hours previously, but this time it was  animated by a couple of coach tours. The first was some kind of Spanish Saga trip. The old dears piled off the coach and immediately formed an orderly queue outside the public toilets. Given that they were of the single cubicle, tardis variety, I expect the tail end is just getting close to the door about now. The second trip was a school party of fourteen year olds. You could tell their age because the girls were tall, buxom and trying to look eighteen, and the boys were small and weedy and desperately trying to look more than ten. There was a large grey bus from Sweden in the car park. Oddly enough there were no Swedes in the village. We concluded that amazed at the cheapness of alcohol, the entire party was probably comatose on the floor of a local hostelry.

It's not been all bad, the showers are warm, and large enough for notices on the to caution campers not to shower together as couples. This is a relief as the cubicles have three quarter doors, bar-room style, which is just a little too public for this northern male. Oh yes, and Gill managed to buy a Spanish SIM card for the Moto, so we're still connected to the outside world, or at least the strange simulcra of it represented in cyberspace.

We going to move on tomorrow, south beyond Taragonna and find a campsite with direct beach access. That's the plan anyway.

Villeneuve to Pals - Spain!

27th October

79 miles

We had factored in a day of frustration attempting to find somewhere to re-fill our LPG bottle. So convinced was I that the pictures of cylinders with big red crosses on them to found on LPG pumps would mean real difficulties finding a garage willing to serveus that I had downloaded a list of six suppliers in the Perpignan area, and identified an aire just 12 miles away where we could head in late afternoon following a gargantuan struggle.

Hi,

Here is the translation:

1. To open the gun, press handle B while keeping handle A pressed in, then release B to arrive at position 2.
2. Insert the gun into the cup so that the 3 “claws” fit behind the outer rim of the cup. Press handle B until it locks (if a leak occurs, release the handle and start again). Fill the tank by pressing the button on the pump.
3. To disconnect the gun from the vehicle: Press handle B in while holding lever A, then gradually release handle B. Hook the gun back onto the pump.

Light the blue touch paper, and…. run away!!!!

Hope all goes well,

Jackie x

Envoyé depuis Windows Mail

De : Gill Turpie
Envoyé : ‎vendredi‎ ‎24‎ ‎octobre‎ ‎2014 ‎19‎:‎42
À : Famille Komaromi Eales

Hya
We are going to fill our GPL cylinder... Not allowed we know....
Could you have a look at the photo of the instructions.... And let us know what it's all about.  We have the special attachment for France...
Help!!
G&P

As it happened, armed with the translation of the pump instructions that Jackie had kindly provided after we sent her a photo of the notice, we struck lucky at our first attempt in Perpignan Auchan and had a full gas cylinder by mid-morning.

 "Let's go to Spain," I suggested. We rolled up at another store, bought two more wine boxes, a load of Lavazza coffee, enough to keep us going until we are back in France next March. Sadly we had a Leffe blond failure as nowhere seemed to stock the 25 bottle cases; it's San Miguel at beer o'clock for the next few weeks I fear.

We trundled through the tawdry border towns, skirted Figeures, then turned towards the coast at Gerona, heading for the campsite near Pals which the ASCI book listed as open all year. An odd aspect of the hinterland of the Costa Brava is although you are south of the Pyrenees, the countryside looks more northern than the Midi, especially in autumn as the woodland is more deciduous than in Roussillon. The agriculture is more mixed too, with fewer vineyards and more ploughed fields. The dryer looking landscape in Languedoc probably has as much to do with the underlying limestone rock, and maybe it lies in the rain shadow of the Pyrenees.

The Catalan yellow and red striped flag was draped over the balconies of many of the houses in the towns we passed through. Roundabouts were festooned with big sheets of yellow plastic and the lamposts decorated with bows in the national colours. It is now less than two weeks before the regional government's unofficial referendum on Catalan independence. It seems from the lack of posters that Madrid must have put the kibosh on overt canvassing - no better together message here - just an official cold shoulder for the whole notion. That could backfire, the region seems bathed in pro-independence yellow and red. Certainly the girl in reception was in no doubt, and full of praise for the UK governments willingness for the Scottish referendum to go ahead. All over Europe national governments are under pressure, not just from calls for greater regional and ethnic  autonomy, but from ordinary people in general who feel that politicians are a law unto themselves and liberal democracy as it exists within the EU is far from the American notion of a Government by the people, for the people. Understandable as those concerns are, the genie of ethnically driven nationalism is a dangerous thing to let out of the bottle. I understand how the Catalans feel concerning the suppression of their identity and persecution of their national leaders under Franco, but the dangers of resurgent nationalism must worry older Spaniards: the bloodiest battle of the civil war was fought in the borders of Catalonia; over 100,000 people died in the Ebro valley. No one would want to see a return to inter-racial war in Western Europe. Ukraine reveals just how quickly such conflicts can develop. The future of the 'European Project' appears to be in some jeopardy, and that, I think is a risk to future peace and stability. It will be interesting to be here in Spain in the next couple of weeks.

So there you have it, today's blog... a change of country, a short diversion on the question of liquid petroleum gas, and an extended diatribe as regards the future of Europe. And I haven't even had a drink yet!

Perfect day...

26th October

I woke up early. Though the skylight, shaft of golden sunlight illuminated the kitchen. I rolled out of bed, pulled on my tracky bottoms and a sweat shirt, grabbed the SLR and headed for the lake. So dawned one of those rare pure blue Mediterranean days - here are some images of it...

A golden dawn

The lake - mirror still

apart from the raucous ducks

and the odd early-bird jogger

too bright to blog

The pitch hedge - bare trees and oleander..not a combination you'd get in Buxton!

fishing through lunch - obsession French-style

umbrella pines looking insect-like

 A rest to eat the patisserie - soggy bottoms, Mary Berry would be outraged!

back to Maisy

cloudless...

Time for the silly sun-hat

Evening light on the Monts Alberes

A perfect day....

Lapradelle to Villeneuve de-la-Räho

25th October

66 miles

A day of two halves - actually if you think about most days are, very few have three. So, better perhaps to write of having had mixed fortunes. It started out well enough, sociable moments beside the WC emptying point, what more could you wish for!  Then off we went, heading towards Perpignan.

After yesterday's drama of the Defile de Pierre-Lys, the way today was a breeze. The D117 passes through a broad valley full of vineyards with high limestone cliffs on each side. The road for the most part is well surfaced, wide and straight, so even the driver gets to appreciate the scenery. I began to mull over the autumn colour of the vineyards. As we have moved south, so has autumn, and in a strange way we have been caught in a perpetual Fall, as if time has stood still. However, these past few days have been colder, particularly at night. Now autumn is  catching up with us. It's not like an English autumn though, partly because so many of the trees are evergreen, and partly because of the sunny skies, it's a very summery sort of autumn down here. Leaf fall in the vineyards is interesting, because the various kinds of vines change at different times. Because Southern French wines are blended from different types of grapes, then in the fields there is a mixture of types.

Sadly I don't know my Mourvèdre from my Cairigne, but I can see that they look different. Some rows are wholly bereft of foliage, reduced to a series of wizened stumps strung together on wires, like we see in April when we have driven south at Easter. Other rows are still in full leaf, a mixture of yellowy green leaves, with patches of russet brown in-between where the types of vine change. The effect of this is very beautiful, and not something either of us have ever experienced, having spent our working lives tied to school holidays.

As you begin leave the Corbieres, and the AOC signs on the village Cave Cooperatives changes to Cotes de Roussillon, so too the landscape changes from one dotted with evergreen oaks to roadsides  edged by Mediterranean pine. The land is flatter and the sky bigger, you sense the proximity of the sea long before you catch a glimpse of it. From Lapradelle to the outskirts of Perpignan is less than an hour's drive, but it is an interesting and varied one with much to savour and you might find yourself replaying in you head in the odd spare moment in more northern climes.

Then you hit the traffic. Built-up areas and motorhomes simply don't mix too well, and the next two hours' attempts to find somewhere to stay, were by turns, stressful, hair-raising, then wholly frustrating. We were headed for an aire situated at a motorhome dealers south of Perpignan. The directions to it seemed clear and simple enough. After we passed the sign to Macdonalds, Latour-bas-Elne for the third time, which featured large in the instructions, we did what we should have done in the first place, and put the GPS coordinates into the satnav. Even with Muriel's haughty assistance it was not easy to find, and featured a narrow lane with deep ditches on each side for the last half kilometre or so. A funny place to site a motorhome dealership;  maybe the place started off selling VW microbuses, and just grew! Anyway we were faced with a closed iron gate on arrival, and a notice intimating that vans could only arrive after 5.00 and had to vacate the pitch before 10.00 the next day, and that, with electricity would be €12 - almost the same as a nearby ACSI campsite. We put the directions to Villeneuve-de-la-Räho Municipal into the Satnav and we were there in less than ten minutes, which was just as well, as we has not yet had lunch, and by now it was well after 2 o'clock.

In the end it proved fortuitous; Villeneuve-de-la-Räho proved rather delightful. As the name suggests it is a new town, but cast visions of Skelmersdale or Harlow from your mind. What the planners have done here is attempted to recreate a French hilltop village. It is situated above a large, oval shaped man-made lake, with spectacular views towards the Pic du Canigou and the Mont Alberes. Earlier we had driven through some grim, soul-less coastal sprawl near St Cyprien and Argeles sur Mer in our multiple circumnavigations of Perpignan, and it is sometimes tempting to simply equate new build with grim. Villeneuve-de-la-Räho shows that planned developments don't always have to grim, you can create placed on a human scale that don' t immediately strike the viewer as a blot on the landscape. It's not perfect, up close, wandering around the maze of streets it does at times have a certain 'toy-town' uniformity, and the newly created village square, with its church, cafe and boulangerie was oddly empty, on Sunday lunchtime. In time though it will develop community one senses, once its thirty something residents stop jogging around the lake anxiously glancing at their watches, and find time to frequent the cafe.

 Villeneuve-de-la-Räho, from across the lake

the old new church

the 'toy-town' streets

the town hall, which would not look out of place in Newport Pagnell.

the empty cafe

I shared this thought with Gill, for as we sauntered around the lake we were constantly overtaken by well honed young things wearing designer shades and a look of grim determination hurtling past on gleaming mountain bikes. Next came the pounding of Nike on gravel as a runner passed at Mo Farrell velocity. Not just the young - grey-haired joggers sometimes in pairs, chatting as they went; power walkers waddling towards us, Nordic walkers gliding by propelled at inhuman speeds on their poles. And all correctly equipped and attired in skin tight black Lycra. Decathlon Perpignan must be the chain's star performer,

"We must be in the fittest place in France," Gill observed.

Montolieu to Lapradelle

24th October

54 miles

Keeping the blog up to date has proved much trickier than I has envisaged. I imagined that more or less in any campsite these days free Wifi would be accessible on the pitch. This is simply not the case. Here, for example, you need to lug your laptop to the foyer by reception in order to connect. However, this morning a whisper of a wifi signal was accessible from the van, it was slow and intermittent, but with perseverance I did manage to upload all of the posts to date and post some photographs. It is the photos that take the time, so if there is a time lag between the written posts and pictures, so be it. Also, it's not always possible to proof read accurately on the hoof, so if a few howlers end up needing to be straightened out afterwards, then I think I'll just have to live with that too.

Anyway, between cleaning the Cadac and fiddling with the blog it was after 11 o'clock before we exited Camping Montolieu. A great little site, everything that you'd expect from a French family run camping: friendly owners, clean facilities with hot water on demand, well hedged generous pitches, informal ambience - tres bien.

Camping Montolieu - a great little site

The Republic of the Recently Retired Congress

Montelieu, looking stunniing... after all the rude things I said about the place!

The light is just astonishing at the moment. The mistral has washed the sky clean. As the autumn colours deepen the sky has become an ever darker blue. As we pulled out of the valley, across a plain of russet brown vines, in the blue distance you could just discern the spiky peaks of the Pyrenees. Then down to earth with a bump - the Carcassonne ring road during the 12.10 rush.

On to Limoux for lunch, we parked the van at the aire, ate the usual bread, ham and cheese, sorted out Maisy at the service point then headed into centre ville for the ritual noisette. We recalled the town from a previous visit to the Corbieres on a camping trip with the kids, almost twenty years ago. We have some video of us all wandering around Limoux's old, arcaded market square , the shadows deep under the hot summer sun. We remembered an ornate fountain with cupids spouting water from their mouths and an ornate, half naked figure of Liberté crowning the ensemble. Not something you'd be likely to find in an English market square, in Thirsk or Ludlow. Back then, to us  Southern Europe seemed strange and exotic, a trifle risqué even. 

Little had changed in Limoux, except the fountain no longer spouted water and some failed restoration project had covered the lovely bronze statues in a thick turquoise coloured protective paint. All the subtlety in the original sculptures had gone, they just looked faintly kitch. What a shame.

Limoux's 'plasticised' fountain

We found a cafe selling Lavazza and settled down with the locals to watch the market being dismantled. Observing other people at work is always a deeply satisfying experience, especially when you've lately escaped its malign clutches yourself.

Half the square was carpeted in flowers. The local stall holders were cashing-in big style on the forthcoming Toussant, the moment when the French, en-masse seize a tub of chrysanthemums and head for the cemetery to remember their dearly departed, followed of course by a big family lunch. A civilised habit I think, and one which must have its roots in pagan ancestor worship, now Christianised.

Limoux itself is an interesting looking place. Just glancing in the immobilier window it's clear that in this area property is somewhat less expensive than in other parts of Mediterranean France. Consequently the area would seem to have developed a fair population of expat Northern Europeans. Judging from the floaty flowered maxi skirts and be-trilbied bearded chaps wandering about, the town seems to be a magnet for the creatively inclined.

We are heading back towards the coast near Perpignan over the next couple of days, then crossing into Spain. The road south takes us through the heart of the Corbiere, following the upper reaches of l'Aude. After Limoux the D119 climbs steeply. The villages assume a more severe, upland appearance. At Quillan, we checked out an aire. It was in the station car park, a bit too public for our liking, so we pressed on. The next part of the route goes through the gorges of the l'Aude. The Defile de Pierre-Lys is a series of vertiginous cliffs. The road is carved into the side of these, a concrete wall on one side protecting traffic from the vertical drop, overhanging rocks and arches with height restrictions creating a hazard on the other. You just have to hold your nerve for the eight of so kilometres of the Defile, and occupy the middle of the road where height is restricted and hope the oncoming traffic gives way.

 I was glad to reach the aire a few kilometres further on in the small mountain village of Lapradelles It is situated next to the Centre de Secours, with room for about six vans, though on fact only three of the bays are level enough to ensure a comfortable night. Luckily there were only three vans using it.

Like many of the valleys hereabouts the crag, high above the village is crowned with a ruined castle. These hills were the last sanctuary of the Cathars, a thirteenth century sect deemed heretical by the papacy. The so called 'Albigensian Heresy' was brutally expunged by forces backed by the Vatican, and one by one these  remote fortresses were starved into submission and their occupants killed brutally. The Middle Ages may seem distant but we don't really learn, the current schism within Islam provokes similar brutality, and before we point the blame at other cultures, we should recall recent European history - Northern Ireland and Bosnia - and the holocaust itself is barely more than one generation ago. These Cathar castles seem sad, haunted places, perhaps because the religious wars they recall are not some distant memory, but still with us and maybe always will be.

We did not climb to the castle. After following some signs up a minor road through a small gorge we reached the footpath. It estimated it would take twenty minutes, but was steep and shingly. It was late afternoon, and in sandals the path would have been too hazardous. At night the castle is flood lit, and the white limestone crags it stands on illuminated in a spooky green light. It's all a bit Scoobydoo for my taste, I think it trivialises the monument, and like the Limoux fountain, borders on the kitch.

The road up to the castle

we stopped at the point where the path headed upwards, near vertically

Gill...rocks!

When we returned to the van we got chatting to the Dutch couple next door. They were in the final stages of a seven week tour that had taken in Western France, Northwest Spain and Portugal, across the Iberian Peninsula, and then via the Costa Brava and into Languedoc. To date they had clocked up 6000 kilometres. Given that this was a hire van and the chap had never driven a motorhome before you have to admire their energy and nerve. There was a romantic aspect to it too. They were partly retracing a journey they had made together when they were younger, forty years ago, around Europe in a Mini.

Gill always tries to pick up some tips about places to stay from people we meet, and they are always pleased to help, because we all like to talk about 'our tour', and if there is no one there to listen, well we just blog about it to empty cyberspace! The sites they recommended were  in Northern Spain, not helpful now, but maybe so next Spring, on our homeward leg.

It's funny how some aires are just friendlier than others. Next morning an English couple from the other van stopped for a chat. They too were heading home, not far for them, they had settled down just north of Bordeaux. Then while we were at the service point a French can drew up. He offered to fill our water tank with his long hose, a nice friendly gesture. His wife joined us and enthused about 'Espagne', in a husky broken English, pre-breakfast cigarette in hand. She had the look of being a real party animal, and briefly I imagined her as being eternally at the head of a never-ending conga dance!