Mountains, a plain, a vineyard, a bodega.

Betera to Careñina, 169 miles Aire Careñina, free, 1 night. 

The Valencia Camper stop is situated near Betera, a small town to the northeast of the city at the end of metro line 1. It's a little less than half an hour into the centre and also convenient for the motorway. After one last glimpse of a grey Mediterranean across a sprawl of factories and orange plantations, we turned north towards Teruel. For the first thirty kilometres or so the road climbs steadily across the southern edge of the Sierra d'Espada until it levels out at an altitude of 1000 metres which it then maintains, more or less, until it reaches Zaragoza in the Ebro valley, 250 kilometres to the north. 

The scale of Spain's central plain has a grandeur that feels more North American than European. At times it can be a monotonous drive, but it is not without interest, partly because it is punctuated by Sierras which appear on the holizon from time to time as a chipped rim to the shallow bowl of high plains. Also, the colours change constantly reflecting the variable geology. For example, Teruel occupies a low mudstone bluff in a small valley. The rock formations and the soil are startlingly reddish, ranging in tone from a dark blood orange to burnt umber. It is very beautiful. 

Red rocks around Teruel

We had planned to stay overnight here, but you make good progress on the empty inland roads of Spain and we arrived by early afternoon. We found a Repsol station and filled up with diesel and LPG. Muriel directed us to the aire; it's in a modern suburb next to a large Social Security office building, more a car park than an official moho stop, but there were two other vans squeezed into the small bays so I guess overnighting is tolerated. Usefully, there is a large Mercadona around the corner. We bought some groceries, had a Greek salad for lunch, and it was still early afternoon. Though our guidebook mentioned that Teruel had an interesting old centre, we decided to press on. The city did look inviting as we caught a glimpse of it from the 'ronda'. It straggles along the edge of a red rock escarpment, the pale stone towers of the cathedral poking up from a cluster of pink stuccoed palacio. The entire landscape looks decidedly sanguine. 

A glimpse of Teruel, another time perhaps....

To the north the prospect is less colourful, especially as the treeless wheat prairies lie fallow right now. Under the fading light of a dull afternoon we crossed the muted patchwork of empty fields, a landscape painted in mauve, beige and lovat. 

Early afternoon - grey roads and red rock; later - red roads and grey rock...and bad modern sculpture to relieve the boredom.

Only when we began to climb towards a pass near Panzina did the scenery become more variable, small clumps of trees with pale grey trunks dotted the hillsides, some autumnal, others bare and wintery. Here the Autovia Mujedar reaches the southern rim of the Ebro valley. As we dropped down towards our destination, the wine town of Cariñena, as you might expect the lower slopes were carpeted with vines of differing varieties, some bright yellow, others almost tangerine, and smaller patches that were bare, their black trunks gnarled with a few sere leaves hanging motionless in the still air of a chilly evening.

Cariñena is a workaday small agro-industrial town with a older centre, but mainly consisting of utilitarian terrace houses and small industrial buildings connected to the wine trade and grain storage. The aire situated next to the sports hall, it is well designed and the services well maintained - which is exacrly what you need.

We had spotted a bodega with a shop that seemed open - very little else did seem open - so we donned scarves and cagoules to see what we could buy. Our Hugh Johnson handbook mentioned that Cariñena is the only DOC where the name of the area is the same as a grape variety - so we headed of into Cariñena in search of a bottle of Cariñena made purely from Cariñena.

Eureka  moment - a bottle of Cariñena made purely from Cariñena...

One of the aspects of Spain that makes you happy is the generally personable and pleasant demeanour of its people. Almost universally they are positive and outgoing and do their utmost to help visitors. Of course there is always going to be exceptions, and the person at the till in the bodega achieved a level of total misery worthy of a British Post Office counter clerk whose pet poodle, that very morning, had come to a sudden, untimely demise. Of course it could be that the Senora had just received some devastating news, so really you cannot judge, but she was spectacularly downbeat.

We bought the bottle Cariñena made purely from Cariñena to take home, but we drank it later that evening and got our best wine buff bullshit out, 'soft fruits, but with a flinty edge' we decided. We can't double check, the other bottles we bought were less expensive mixed grape types with a Temporilla base - like Rioja, which in truth is only just up the road.

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Valencia, beyond the market.

 The first time we visited Valencia in 2014 we walked for miles over two days covering most of the central area and the amazing contemporary architecture at the City of Arts and Sciences. This time we spent three hours in the market. Outside it was drizzly, we had a Giant 'bag for life' full of goodies we had bought in the marke, so another urban hike was out of the question. Nevertheless, we did not head straight back to the Angel Gomera metro station but took a slightly circuitous route via the Plaza del Ayuntamiento and the Estación del Norte.

Estacion del Norte:

This was enough to remind us that the city has a clutch of beautiful modernista buildings, enough to rival Barcelona's claim to be the styles' capital. I suppose what Valencia lacks is the Catalan capital's Gaudi masterpieces. To me, however, Valencia is more relaxed and convivial, less obviously a hen party heaven and considerably safer. It may be purely coincidence, but both times we have been to Barcelona we have witnessed street crime. Anyway, Valencia beyond the market, it's a lovely city, a must see place in my opinion. It certainly is somewhere that will tempt us to break our rule of thumb about always going somewhere new. If nothing else, the platter of verdura tempura shared by the group office workers sitting beside us in Bar Central which we foolishly failed to choose off the 'specials' menu is reason enough to return in itself.

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Mercat Central - the horn of plenty.

Moraira to Betera, 89 miles, Valencia Camper Park, €15 euros per night with ECU., 2 nights. 

An old ceramic sign above the side door to Valencia's Mercat Central features a motif of a lemon branch below the text, and an image of the horn of plenty above. I am not particularly a fan of flag waving or heraldry, but if you wanted to design a national emblem that actually meant something, rather than arcane stuff involving unicorns, golden lions or angry looking eagles, then maybe the these motifs would make a good emblem for some ideal republic committed to the happiness and welfare of its people. The lemon branch has connotations of freshness and zest, the horn of plenty infers that the fruits of the earth should be shared so there is plenty for everyone. Of course, history tells us that in practice this is merely a utopian dream, but what is an impossible aspiration on a national scale sometimes is possible achievable locally. Valencia's Mercat Central is a miniature epicurean utopia. 

So what is so great about it?  Undoubtedly a key part of its appeal is its anti-corporate nature. The place is co-owned and run as a co-operative by the stall-holders; what you get is a healthy diversity, The goods on offer are not repackaged and resold to consumers based on fatuous research derived from focus groups and the analysis of Facebook likes. The 'proposition' as our friends in the marketing department might call it, is more straightforward than that. Based on knowledge of the foodstuffs that the people of Valencia habitually buy the stall-holders provide it at a fair price, so customers habitually turn up and shop. The place is an amenity not a brand; the market is refreshingly free from marketing. 

The culture which developed and sustains a market like this places food and cooking as a 'pillar of society'. By and large there are only ingredients sold here, so the people who use it, and the customers seem a cross-section of Valencians, must all cook. This is possible, firstly, because the way things are organised allows people time to cook - the two shift day with a three hour break in the early afternoon must help in this respect. The other thing that helps the market thrive is that Valencia city centre has a large resident population, not everyone has moved to the suburbs, and even those who have are well served by efficient, affordable public transport. To browse and buy ingredients here is an utter delight, and as far away away as you can get to trundling a trolley around Tesco Extra and paying an automaton at the end for the pleasure. 

Of course Valencia is not the only city to retain its market, and we have been to smaller, peripatetic weekly markets, particularly in France, that provide rural communities with a similar service - I am thinking here of the outstanding market we came across in Meze, in Languedoc last May. What makes Valencia special is that it does this on an epic scale. The phrase that it is a cathedral built in praise of plenty may seem a little droll, until you raise your eyes heavenwards, then it becomes fact. At the centre of the building is an airy dome; the cantalevered vault of the main hall rises up like a wrought iron Modernista pastiche of a High Gothic cathedral. Completed in 1928, Mercat Central is a glorious example of the the Modernista style at its most vivacious and captivating. Bread and wine is on offer here, but the sacrament also involves courgettes, chorizo and red mullet - Faith Hope and chorizo, but the greatest of these is chorizo! 

So if we are going to get carried away with religious analogies, then a shrine must have its inner sanctum. This has to be Bar Central. Standing at the counter with glass of Rueda in one hand and a deconstructed carrot cake in front of me which is pleading to be savoured slowly, I posted the following on Facebook:

 "For us, the Central Bar in Valencia Market is simply one of the most civilised places we have ever been. It is managed by a locally renowned chef, Richard Camarena who espouses a nil kilometres philosophy, sourcing all his ingredients from the market on a daily basis. The market itself is run as a cooperative by the stall holders. Who says the corporate must always prevail?" 

Does this stuff matter? I think so, because we need to rediscover the importance of actual stuff, the delights of the palpable. Gill mentioned this morning that the BBC had featured a piece on a new book, 'Dethroning Mammon' by Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The dear old Bish's warnings on the dangers of materialism may seem timely, but the antidote - a reassertion of the spiritual - seems to me to be a cure which worse than the disease. Rather than embrace the ineffable, what I think we need is to pursue a more thoughtful form of materialism one that celebrates the earthly and distrusts the unworldly. Personally, I cannot really see the essential difference between Baudrillard's simulacra and a medieval theologian's musings about the Holy Spirit. The virtual and the immanent may not be the same thing, but how they function within a culture seems similar. Both undermine our sense of the real and palpable by suggesting what we take to be authentic is merely a reflection of something more profound. 

This seems to me to be  deeply unhelpful. We no longer believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden and most of us probably are a bit sceptical about the Virgin Mary being able to put a good word in with the Almighty on our behalf, but somehow we fail to notice that we are still influenced, controlled even, by unreal forces from beyond, the fairies have become pixels and they work their invisible magic on us, like by like, tweet by tweet from remote faceless data storage facilities. 

People are beginning to wake up to this. An email promoting this week's TLS popped into my inbox a few minutes ago with the title, 'The web of 'lies'. How algorithms manipulated social media output to help the Leave campaign and Trump to victory is gradually being better understood. A debate is developing about the impact of the virtual on the real. This is a good thing. 

The best way to celebrate actuality is to 'get real' and indulge in some simple earthly pleasures, perhaps walk along a sea shore, or take a moment to stare at the yellowing autumn leaves, or, alternatively, buy the ingredients for a really good paella at Valencia's Mercat Central. None of those things require you to be connected to anything, and you will feel refreshed and invigorated in a way that only doing real stuff can do. Furthermore, for as long as you are disconnected you will have popped the virtual world back into the toybox where it belongs, or to misquote Mr Leary, "Turn off, wake up, tune in."

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Camping Moraira, a conversation about staying put and questions of style and substance.

As I mentioned in the previous post, two of the British couples staying here are planning to rent villas for a month or two during the coldest months. Like a lot of people, one couple had rented their house in the UK to help fund their travels - so from time to time they get a 'bricks and mortar' urge and rent somewhere for a while. That is really quite an exciting thing to do. You might decide to become a temporary citizen of Malaga,Marseilles or Athens, then after the short term lease is up carry on with your travels. I think Gill and I could do that, but I don't think it would be acceptable to our grown-up children. They still think of our house back in Buxton as the family home and their views matter too.

Unlike many sites on the Costa Blanca, Camping Moraira is not a place that people tend to over-winter in. The last time we were here we more or less had the place to ourselves. This time it is a bit busier, but there are still fewer than half a dozen mohos parked-up. It's odd really, because Moraira town seems full of British people, who either own or rent property. Perhaps the  2km walk along the shore to the town centre   or the short steep hill up to the site put people off. Also, due to the wooded nature of the site, many of the terraced pitches are not suitable for motorhomes, and those that are seem narrow, so you would struggle to 'spread out' under your awning, or establish an outdoor kitchen like many over-winterers like to do. Added to that access roads are tight. It took a lot of care and crossed-fingers to extricate ourselves from the site when we left.

Stylish reception

Dawn light

Tricky pitches - narrow, with random trees scattered about

The place has good points. It is home to a lively colony of squirrels and has abundant bird life - which is fun to watch. There is a view of the bay giving great sun rises if you are an earlybird. The showers are reliably warm, and each pitch has its own water point and an emptying drain. Then there is the question of the sanitary block doors, which must be said go beyond the category of being memorable and reach the heady heights of the unforgettable. What is certain, is they are utterly unequivocal, there is no way you will  ever inadvertently walk into the opposite sex's facilities.

The full panel graphic on the male showers block door is a bit 'Men's Health'.

Conversely the female block door is distinctly Cosmo Badedas ad.

 On the other hand, the toilet block doors defy description, what can you say?  If the only criteria for good graphic design was clarity of message, then these would be outstanding - a triumph of substance over style...

The world is full of surprises, sometimes bewilderingly so.