Embracing the unexpected

One thing you cannot rely on at all, doing what we are doing, is for things to happen in quite the way you might expect. Today should have been straightforward. We planned to find a Carrefour in Almeria, do a big shop, then drive to an ASCI camp site about five miles to the west of the city. In fact, this is exactly what we did do, but it all seemed unexpectedly fraught.

It did not help that the forecast rain duly arrived, so we got fairly cold and damp as we un-pitched. Almeria's Carrefour hypermarket was easy enough to find on Google maps, so with the GPS co-ordinates set in the Sat-nav what could possibly go wrong?

Every other Carrefour I've ever visited has always been on the edge of town with acres of half empty car parking spaces around it, apart from in Almeria, where it's situated down a city centre side street with height restricted multi-storey parking. As I tried as best I could to manoeuvre Maisy around Almeria's, many multi-lanes roundabouts, Gill found a nearby Alcampo store on the sat nav. It had open air parking, though the bays were alarming narrow for a motorhome, and it did take me three attempts to find the entrance, each failure prompting yet another circumnavigation of the manic local one way system.

Alcampo is Spain's equivalent to Auchan in France. Their stores are huge, acres of stuff, all bewilderingly organised to flummox the hapless customer. So with a trolley full of all the things you need, and piles of other random stuff thrown in just because, you find yourself reduced to the last two items on the list - houmous and couscous. Down endless aisles of yoghurt, through neighbourhoods of rice and pasta, past a fish freezer the size of Wimbledon we wandered, and reaching a small chiller shelf, squeezed between haloumi and tzaki, there enthroned in lone splendour, sat one small pot of houmous. Our welling sense of triumph over adversity was sadly short lived, despite further extensive exploration not a grain of  couscous was to be had. "I think we'll stick to smaller stores in future," Gill remarked as we exited Alcampo  some hours later.

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Back to the nightmare roundabouts... but eventually we did find the AP 7 junction, and after just one exit were heading down a series of hairpin bends and tunnels through the the cliffs towards Camping La Garoffa.

The roads on his part of the Costa Almeria resemble the corniche on the Cote d'Azur. The road nearest the beach is a tarmac ex-donkey track. A couple of hundred feet above this is what remains of the original main coast road, narrow and running precipitously along the cliff edge. Then high above, leaping across ravines on concrete stilts, blasted through mountains by tunnel and cuttings, the AP 7 motorway slices westwards towards Malaga and Cadiz. Every few kilometres these three coast roads are inter-connected by serpentine, vertiginous narrow tracks with passing places. 

Camping La Garoffa is situated at the foot of one of these roads, squeezed-in between two cliffs and occupying the narrow hinterland of a pebbly black sand cove.

Camping La Garrofa

Looking down from the old viaduct, we're camped directly underneath!

La Garrofa beach

Nearby cliffs with precariously sited '60's hotel developments.

The site itself is slightly down at heel. But the facilities,  though hardly modern, are well kept and clean. It has a good small restaurant serving a menu del dia for 7.50 euros and the Med laps less than 50 yards from where we are parked.

It is strange how places take on a particular vibe. The last place, despite being more or less in the middle of nowhere, assumed a somewhat suburban ambience, created mainly by the rows of neat Dutch, German and British caravans. The question we got asked was, "Are you going to stay here long?" It was as if the fellow campers were keen to co-opt new arrivals into their community of over-wintering refugees. Here the questions are different. "Where have you been? Where's next? Let me tell you about a great place to stay in the Alpujarras." We've been free camping on the beach for the last week, but the police moved us on." "You'll like it here, it's really laid back." And it is; nobody is trying to prove anything to anyone. The vans themselves are not shiny status symbols, sprouting NASA satellite dishes, but like Maisy somewhat venerable vehicles who, like their occupants, have that slightly crusty look of having been camped out in a desert for weeks.

  

It is quirky here, parked up under the arch of an old viaduct next to the sea. I like it, we'll stay a couple of days, visit Almeria, then head further south to somewhere else we have never been to before where we can embrace the unexpected elsewhere.