Travelling towards catastrophe

I am not a glass half empty kind of person. No, I'm more likely to have smashed the costly antique crystal tumbler to smithereens cracking the irreplaceable Victorian floor tiles;  immediately  I would have trampled on the shattered fragments, and now find myself bleeding profusely from multiple lacerations to both feet - but be unable to phone for help for fear of ruining the white deep-pile hall-way carpet, preferring certain death to making a social gaff. Blessed with a natural propensity to catastrophise, travel for me is not so much a paradise of pitfalls, but the gradual unfolding of an imaginary disaster movie.

The fact that we had parked the motorhome for two months near Alicante airport is not as it would appear to most people - a pretty nifty way of nipping home for Christmas during an extended escape south; instead it is an opportunity for catastrophic rumination.

1. On arrival we will discover that Royal Parking has gone into liquidation and we become enmeshed in months of legal wrangling to recover possession of the van.

2. The phone number for the parking place is incorrect on the print-out and we will be stranded at the airport.

3. Not only will the van fail to start, but further investigation will reveal some massively expensive repair is required; the parts being in short supply will result in us having to shell-out hundreds of euros on hotel bills while we wait for the van to be fixed.

4. Inexperience in driving the van after dark will lead to a terrible collision involving:

 a. the side panel of a top of the range Carthago owned by the head of a Costa del Crime drug baron being stove-in due to my inept reversing skills,

 b. soon after leaving the car park I will drive up a street on the left-hand British side.An on-coming mini-bus full o orphans returning from the holiday of a lifetime will swerve to avoid me, crash into a palm tree and burst  into flames.

Of course what really happened - we slithered from home to the bus-stop through the snow. The 199 bus duly turned up on time and deposited us at Manchester airport. We zipped through security and the Monarch flight arrived in Alicante 20 minutes early due to a favourable tail-wind. The minibus from Royal Parking arrived as planned. The guy at the parking had already checked that Maisy would start, and within a few minutes we were on our way. Finding Camping Marjal in the dark was easy; the Satnav took us straight there. They were full, but had a place for the next day and were happy for us to sleep over in the car-park. We woke next morning to wall to wall blue, a sparkly, but chilly Med. Not a catastrophe in sight!

Waiting for the bus

Waiting for the plane

Full moon over the Auvergne

In-flight entertainment

W H Smiths elderly salads for dinner...the wine was good though!

Maisy in the morning, outside Camping Marjal

Back to ebikes through the eco-park - magic!

Still, it did not stop me dreaming last night that the Ebola epidemic had spread across the Straits of Gibraltar. Andalucia had been quarantined. We were trapped. Soon law and order broke down. The entire region became a dystopian nightmare, like something out of 'The Road'. We drove quickly through a village. People suspected of carrying the virus were being rounded-up and burned alive...

I think the news from Jordan must have been playing on my mind. In some parts of the world our darkest dreams are some poor soul's reality.

I do try to rationalise my worst fears, and I don't usually verbalise them, though I might have said to Gill, "I hope the van starts OK."