What's bugging us?

We are not sure, but we've both been intemittently slightly unwell for weeks, in my case for months. The same symptoms repeatedly - sore throat or ear ache, itchy eyes, occasionally a bit of a cough and the feeling that you are going to succumb to a fluey cold. Then you feel fine for couple of weeks before the pattern repeats itself. Annoying. Is it some form of mild long covid? 

We probably should chat to a GP about it when we get back, though actually getting to speak to a doctor is not straightforward. The NHS is falling to bits, sadly the practice we are signed up with is collapsing more quickly than most. A couple of weeks ago we got a feed from our local paper announcing the place had been put into special measures after the Quality Care Commission found, amongst a host of other failings, a pile of 2000 letters from hospital consultants that had not been dealt with. It was never a great practice, but just before Covid struck the group of doctors we had known for years all took early retirement when the place was acquired by an American owned conglomerate. The firm operates a dozen or so GP practices across Northwest England. It's far too late to be concerned about the NHS being privatised, large swathes of it already is, contracted out to 'health care providers' with shareholders to satisfy. 

Having felt less than perky in Zaragoza I was pleased to feel much brighter while in Logroño. From there we planned to stay put for a few days in Zumaia in the run up to Easter, maybe take a day trip by train to San Sebastian and perhaps another to Bilbao. Sadly it was fated not to happen, we both went down with a classic fluey cold. Just like the one that I claimed a paragraph or two never seemed to fully develop from its mild early symptoms.

So we stayed put on the campsite, only venturing out for a daily walk down into town. Luckily the weather was bright and sunny, chilly mornings but with warm afternoons. We have used the site in Zumaia so many times that when we arrive the woman on reception says 'hello again'.

Day one - we walked towards the port area down the riverside path...

Took a photo or two of the old town...

Found the cafe where we had tostas last time we were here, shared a Basque cheesecake with our coffees,

Walked to the beach area and admired the spectacular geology....

Day two - exactly the same as day one, apart from café, we went to a different one but ate the same thing. Brain fog is probably overstating our state of mind, but we are definitely happy to just do the same thing, which is not typical.

So, day three, same thing! We decided that you can have too much of a good thing so far as Basque cheesecake goes. Also, just to get a different perspective of the amazing geology we decided to climb up to the white church on the western side of the bay. A coastal path runs from here to Deba. 

Zumaia seems to be a popular place for a day trip, since it was Good Friday it was busy, the coast path especially. A couple of hours wandering about is as much as we could manage so we headed back to the van. Time to pack overnight bags for the boat. Setting out on a trip is an event, a moment. The end of a journey just drains away, not water under the bridge, more like down the plughole! 

Feeling ill dampened our spirits further. Not being able to do much did enable us to spend time discussing future plans. We have vehicle dilemmas. Our car is 13 years old, a diesel Ford Focus estate. There is nothing wrong with it, at 80,000 miles it's got plenty of life in it. However, it is overdue a new cam belt and the rear suspension has an ominous clunk. The cost of the repairs are at least as much as the value of the car. We probably should replace it when we get back.

Then there is the moho question. It's nine years old, has over 50,000 miles on the clock and looks well used. As last month's debacle over getting the fridge repaired showed, if you travel for almost half the year you do need a dependable vehicle and the older the vehicle the less dependable it becomes. It's tempting to trade it in for a more recent model with a low mileage. After checking on-line the cost of doing so was shocking. When we bought our current motorhome in 2018 it was four years old with a low mileage. It cost £44,000. To buy a similarly aged vehicle now would be around £70,000. Does it make any sense at all to invest tens of thousands of pounds in something newer, but practically the same, especially as the rate of depreciation for older motorhomes is half that of newer ones? We concluded it makes more sense to refurbish our current van rather than swap it for a newer model.

This is not entirely a pecuniary matter, there is a more salutary consideration. When we began wandering about for months on end back in 2014 , aside from the occasional full-timer, the odd digital nomad or families home-schooling on the move, the majority of retirees 'living the dream' were some years older than us. These days the situation has reversed, most people doing what we do are some years younger than we are. What is more thought provoking is that the most elderly people we come across look as if they are about five years older than us. No doubt there are exceptions here and there, but in the main it seems to be the case that most people seem to reach a point where being on the road for months on end stops being fun by the time they hit their early seventies. We don't regard ourselves as exceptional, so it makes sense to invest and maintain the moho we have rather than spend all our savings buying a more recent model. Our wandering days are not exactly numbered but they are finite. It took us a while to reach this conclusion, but between being laid-up with the bug and enforced 'leisure time' on the return ferry we had thinking time aplenty. 

As well as concluding that we needed to swap our car but keep the same moho we entertained ourselves on the crossing by moaning about it. We were lucky, it was flat calm for both coming and going, otherwise the whole experience was utterly charmless. 

Brittany Ferries' marketing pitch attempts to persuade their hapless customers that they are on a 'cruise ferry'. What this offers is a triumph of style over substance. The ferry itself is decked out in ludicrously quirky style that is uniquely French. The catering a arrangements reflect a Gallic insistence on 'le menu' with full table service and a Maitre 'd at the front desk trained in customer scare. As for the food, it was terrible, a mis-cued  pitch at gastronomy, weird, badly cooked and laughably over-priced. 

The long sea crossing makes sense on the outward route, this trip is the first time it is the first time we have used it both ways. In January or February it makes sense, saving a cold drive the length of France. Using ir to return later in the the Spring it makes less sense, it is about £200 more than the cost of fuel, overnight stops and motorway tolls, it is tedious and the food is borderline inedible. Maybe the long drive is preferable.

The Solent was grey and foggy, border force at Portsmouth affable, which not always the case when you arrive at Calais.

We were booked into a Caravan and Motorhome site near Winchester. The place has set aside a dedicated hardstanding area for late arrivals off the ferry. It's accessed through a secure automatic barrier with a code hidden in an envelope pinned to a nearby notice board. It's all a bit 'Famous Five', but the arrangement worked.

 I am not a fan of the 'club' and have fulminated about its 'boy scouts' trained wardens a few times on the blog. In fairness the arrangement for ferry customers at the Winchester site worked well and we would use it again.

We headed home next day. It may be mid April but it still looked like winter in the Pennines. I still feel buggy, the weather forecast is gloomy, increasingly Britain feels as foreign as being abroad. However it is our home country, so somehow I am going to have to find away of feeling more positive about it. I don't know how.

The joy of small plates

Logroño, the Rioja region's compact capital, is only a couple of hours drive north west from Zaragoza. The motorway follows the Ebro valley a few kilometres to the south of the river itself. 

We figured if we managed to exit the Zaragoza campsite by elevenish we would reach Logroño in time to walk into the city for lunch at one of its many pinchos bars. We've been caught out before by the place's complicated Sunday opening arrangements; some bars operate only in the afternoon, others just in the evening, many both times but always with a break in between servings which varies from place to place. We know our favourite spots so hatched a two pronged assault to ensure we were not caught out.

We spent most of the journey to to Logroño rehearsing a range of minor disasters that might imminently befall us: the opening times of the restaurants shown on Google might be incorrect because today was Palm Sunday, the extensive areas autocaravanas would be full because of Semana Santa celebrations, bars would be so busy that getting served would be problematic. None of these things happened.

There was a Sunday market occupying part of the big space that motorhomes use (we hadn't thought of this particular glitch), but the area is huge, there were lots of vans drawn up but still plenty of space for more.

We headed straight out, across the bridge over the Ebro and up the main street towards the cluster of small alleys around Calle Laurel that are full of small bars vying to outdo each other's 'small plate' delights.

The area was busy, but not impossibly crowded, anyway people here are accommodating and amiable, willing to shuffle along to make space for others.

Our plan was to find the place where we had the best patatas bravas ever back in February 2020, the problem was, we hadn't made a note of the place's name, neither in the blog nor in the handwritten diary that Gill keeps. But we had taken a photo of the dish at the time and Google photos records the location of every single camera click. We may live in some kind media driven dystopia, but sometimes it comes in handy. 'Bar Jubera' Google advised was the place of the beauteous patatas, so we headed towards there, a big sign by the door boasted 'Especialidad, Patatas Bravas!'

We squeezed into a space at the bar beside the front door, it was a bit tricky with people coming and going but we managed to order two white Riojas and two portions of patatas bravas. 

The bar staff are impressive, keeping track of who ordered what in seemingly chaotic circumstances. Two glasses of wine duly arrived along with one portion of patatas bravas which we shared. 

 After a while we managed to muscle into a space next to the window with a narrow shelf to use as a table. We had just about given up on the second bowl of bravas when it appeared, passed along a line of people from the bar to us. It's all very jolly and convivial, a happy place. 

We moved on, just around the corner to Bar Sebas. This place specialises in tortillas, and was somewhere else we have been to before. We shared it's signature tortilla and ordered what looked like deep fried prawns. 

One was, the other was a deep fried soft boiled egg. Unusual. The place had an impressive range of Riojas on sale, though we went for the house wine, one white, one red.

By now it was fourish, as if by magic the area emptied, no 'time gentlemen please' just some implicit social contract between diners and bar staff that they both needed a break before the evening shift.

Back to the van, en route I stopped momentarily to take a photo of an old mansion with a pleasing plateresque doorframe. Then a hat shop. I am in the market for a new wide brimmed hat. 

My battered  beach bum sun hat finally had to go after  black mould spread from the inside and started to speckle the brim. It had become more of a wearable biological hazard than a rakish  accessory channelling the young Harrison Ford (beach bum hat 1 was actually  replica Indiana Jones headgear purchased in Disneyland Paris in 2003).

The shop really did have some lovely hats in the window, especially the one on the top right, a tad pricey at €214!

I have a very functional attitude towards clothing. Only three criteria matter to me - practicality, price and invisibility. This latter quality has nothing to do with Harry Potter, what I mean is does the garment contribute to you not being noticed, does it help you to disappear into the crowd and cease to exist in the eyes of others?  Over the years I have become adept at all of this, apart from in one area, I find beautiful hats alluring. Am I capable of ditching my principles and splashing out serious money on a fabulous hat? Maybe, luckily the shop was closed.

We wiled away the rest of the afternoon, Gill engrossed in her knitting while I tapped away on my phone. As the sun set we headed back to Calle Laurel. You can the hear the place you before you see it, a babbling brook of voices, then as you turn the corner a wall of humanity, every alley packed with locals out for the  evening. We melted into the crowd.

First stop, Bar Soriana. It's hardcore! A place that firmly adheres to the values of the traditional pinchos bar. It only has one dish on offer, grilled mushrooms, piled up one on top of the other on a slice of baguette. Each mushroom has a small prawn secreted within it. It comes searingly hot and is seriously delicious, perfect with a white Rioja.

What is on offer is almost embarrassingly cheap. The bill for two grilled mushrooms and two glasses of wine - €6.30. 

The business model is based on volume - portions are small, but very tasty, people go from bar to bar sampling a snack here and a snack there. In most places it's standing room only. The bars themselves are not stylish but unfussy and practical, in the case of Bar Soriana 'spartan' might be a better word.

Most of the bars seem to be run by friendly but slightly scary matriarchs. However, Bar Soriana has an all male crew, the owners we presumed, we recognised all of them from our previous two visits. 

Pinchos is a Castillian adaptation of the Basque term pintxos, bite sized delicacies which I suppose we would call finger food or canapes. In England they've got Hyacinth Bucket connotations, but in northern Spain pintxos has more demotic roots. In the early twentieth century the gastronomy of the region was maintained and developed by all male 'cookery societies'. Perhaps the 'gastro-barmen' of Soriana are a last vestige of those.

These days Logroño's pinchos bars are very inclusive places and Letras de Laurel is typical, bar at the front, small dining room at the rear for people who want a meal rather than a snack and a drink. It was the front for us along with all and sundry!  Whereas in Zaragoza's tapas places we were the oldest customers, sometimes by decades, here isn't some hipster foody enclave. The customer base is cradle to grave,  great to see three generations enjoying a night out together. 

The young couple at the table next to us had a baby with them, almost a toddler, maybe eighteen months or so. She wasn't walking or talking but ate with style and had already mastered the art of spearing a potato cube with a cocktail stick. After rubbing it in a dollop of sauce on her dad's  plate she popped the morsel into her mouth looking very pleased with herself. Impressive!  You can see how Spain supports a plethora of regional and local food cultures, people are born to it; whereas we have appropriated others cultures' gastronomy - Italian, South Asian, Far Eastern and fast food from the US.

Above all eating out here is nothing special, it's affordable and not regarded as 'a treat'. Eating places are as commonplace as pubs and often have a similar workaday ambience with a big screen TV somewhere showing some incomprehensible game show or a tedious mid-table La Liga clash between Ciudad Real and Murcia. In fact the entertainment in Letras de Laurel consisted of looping Shakira videos. They can be somewhat distracting, as Gill observed, 'she really is exceptionally bendy'. There'was one with her gyratingin front of a row of urinals. A little weird and not really ideal entertainment while eating pinchos.

We decided to try the place's spinach croquettes which were lighter and more subtly seasoned than the ones we had the previous day  in Zaragoza. Reviews of the  cheesecake were very complimentary, we had to check this out too. 

They were fine, the problem is I haven't a particularly sweet tooth, in the end I probably would have preferred to try another savoury dish.

We don't know how late the evening pinchos fest lasts, sometime after eight we decided to walk baçk to the van. It was not fully dark yet. Logrono is very atmospheric at twilight, especially the crowded alleys around Calle del Laurel.

The empty streets of the city centre have a more haunting feel, dreamlike almost..

...especially the long bridge across the Ebro the fading light reflected darkly in the placid water.

When we got back to the van Jupiter was bright in the west as it has been for a couple of weeks or so.

It felt milder tonight, definitely spring-like. A week  today we will be back in England, suddenly I felt the trip slipping away, lived moments destined to become distant memories. It's easier to accept time passing in places you feel certain you will return to. Logroño is definitely one of them. Auden ended his valedictory poem to 'The South' with this observation:

"though one cannot always

Remember exactly why one has been happy,

There is no forgetting that one was."

Calle del Laurel - one of our happy places without a doubt. 

A to Z and the peculiar bits in-between

Camping Altamira to Zaragoza - about 160 miles, more or less my preferred distance to drive in one day. In this case, northwards up the A23 motorway. Aside from Teruel there are no large towns, it's a depopulated landscape of dry upland plains with more mountainous bits in between - 'Espagna vaciada', empty Spain. Compared to the A7 which follows the Mediterranean coast there is little traffic. I set the cruise control to 60mph and watched the world pass by. With the high plains at about 700m and the mountain passes 500m higher I also watched the average fuel gauge notch downwards from 30.3 to 29.6mpg. Still, it's a lot better than our first motorhome, a Ford Transit with dual wheels on the back which on a good day managed no more than 22mpg.

Why are we heading to Zaragoza? A good question, by a process of elimination probably. I rejected the idea of heading to the north coast via Tarragona and Huesca because erroneously I thought it was the long way round. The plan to stay in Albarracin then head north through Soria and Logroño fell foul of our concerns about how busy sites might get during 'Semana Santa', so we've settled on the more boring option aiming for sites in Zaragoza and Zumaia because they are easily bookable. Also, both of us feel less than perky, we've picked up a bug somewhere. Gill felt so lousy she took a Covid test. It was negative, but that in itself doesn't mean she feels any better, just less of a biological hazard.

Zaragoza is Aragon's regional capital. It was founded by the Romans, its name an imperfect Arabic transcription of the title of the city's founder, 'Caesar Augustus'. Subsequently it was ruled by the Franks and then the Arabs, before becoming the capital of the Kingdom of Aragon in the mid twelfth century. It was besieged many times, in the War of Spanish Succession, in the Napoleonic period and twice during the Spanish civil war.

Today it is a productive industrial city specialising in automotive and aeronautical engineering and builds trams and rolling stock for light railways. Though the place has a compact historical centre most of the buildings date from the twentieth century. It's fair to say it is not Spain's most beautiful city, partly due to its location. It straddles the Ebro, otherwise the environs are waterless, a wilderness of dessicated white rock.

The place split the cab. Gill found the centre cold and corporate, the recently constructed outskirts bland, soul-less and somewhat Ballardian, the people not quite so amiable and accommodating as you usually find in Spain. She was right, but as I mentioned in the previous post I am someone who can become mildly obsessed with the design of a distribution centre or motorway interchange and have a bit of a soft spot for brutalist carbuncles. In that sense Zaragoza is my kind of town!

I only took a few photos of Zaragoza's under appreciated contribution to mid twentieth century urban design; here's one taken from the bus-stop.

The number 41 bus takes a circuitous route into the centre, much of the outskirts look as if they were planned in the 1980s, an enormous swathe of apartments, shopping centres and villa developments built to a strictly geometric plan, as if you had plonked Milton Keynes into the Arizona desert. Much of it did seem windswept and bleak.

I also could see where Gill was coming from about the centre of the city feeling corporate with its big office blocks and wide avenues. However not all of the architecture was mundane, there were a few commercial buildings from the 1920s with a bit of jazz age pizzazz.

Some of the more recent ones attempted to overcome their style deficit by embracing enormity, sadly ugliness does not diminish with size.

The city centre lacks greenery, there are public spaces but they all seem to specialise in odd metallic post-modern installations.

However, we weren't here to critique Zaragoza's urbanism but as usual seeking somewhere for lunch, namely the el Tuba area which has a reputation as a bit of a foody enclave.

 It consists of a few narrow alleys in the oldest part of the city, a mix of old established tapas bars with a cluster of newer pop-up style restaurants in graffiti daubed vacant lots.

Yesterday evening I downloaded an article about Zaragoza's emerging food scene, so we had identified a couple of well reviewed places before we arrived. Aragonese cuisine tends to be meaty like in other inland regions of Spain. Croquettes feature too, which is more our thing. 

We headed for Taberna Doña Casta which has a whole menu dedicated to croquettes. 

 We went for the Jamon Iberica with nuts and cheese....

then the mushrooms with goats cheese..

All the while I entertained Gill about the place being the finest place for tapas in South Yorkshire and that the Spanish food would be better without so much jam on. Luckily she's a very long suffering person with a forgiving nature. We headed off to explore the historical bit.

The classic touristy shot of Zaragoza is of the multi-domed baroque Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar taken from half way across the Puente de Piedra. Never one to pass over the opportunity to reinforce a stereotype I patiently waited my turn to go click.

It is an humongous church. The Spanish States' appetite for over blown gigantic buildings is something that seems to persist across the ages, from Seville's thirteenth century cathedral which aimed to be the biggest church in Christendom to huge Baroque structures like this one.

It's difficult not to regard Gaudi's Sagrada Familia or secular buildings like el Escorial, Plaza Espagna in Seville or Valencia's Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias as all part of this urge to construct enormous monuments. I am not a fan, I think it was Albert Camus who wrote "It's a strange and insufferable uncertainty to know that monumental beauty always supposes servitude."

We decided we needed a coffee. Most places around the cathedral area looked like tourist traps. I summoned-up TripAdvisor and found a place called Café Botanico with four stars. It seemed to be within easy walking distance but down an obscure narrow alley. Google to the rescue, I typed its name into Maps and the posh voiced assistant led us there.

On the way we passed a Goya Museum, I had forgotten he was Aragonese. It was open, but by this time my need for a coffee was greater than my urge to admire Goya's etchings. Moreover, Gill gets very disconsolate very quickly in art galleries; her pain is more profound than my delight, so we tend to walk on by.

I liked Café Botanico. It had a laid-back mid-noughties ambience with stylishly random up-cycled furniture, quirky lights and background music that I recognised as something that wafted out of our elder daughters bedroom when she was in sixth form. 

I couldn't put a name to the band. Again Google to the rescue. Gill made her phone listen to a snippet of the song - it was something by 'The Shins' the app reliably informed us. Most of us identify with a particular musical era, usually the music from our late teens and early twenties, in our case the early to mid seventies. However if you have kids the music they listened to also sticks in your mind.

I felt curiously content sitting in Café Botanico listening to the Shins, a tad nostalgic too, recalling the times we spent in Bristol eating a relaxed Sunday brunch in some hipsterish café off Whiteladies Rd, when our elder two were at University.

We decided the cakes looked good, we couldn't decide which to choose so the waitress said she would bring us two small portions of different ones. The small portion were quite big.

I was still musing about how our kids taste in music had influenced my own. It was true for the elder two but not in our youngest daughter's case. From an early age she loved J-pop and K-pop, was and still is deeply into Manga, Animé and Cosplay. When she was in her teens we were in our mid fifties, too old to cosplay 'Bleach'! We did end up at a lot of Animé conventions though. Laura's interests influenced us in a different way, she persuaded us to take her to Japan. We loved it. One day we will go back. Lots has been written about how parents influence children, but it's a reciprocal process, I've learned a lot from all three of our children.

We've been travelling for over two months now, perhaps the music in the café had made me homesick, not for England particularly, but I was missing our kids. 

We headed to the bus stop, back on the 41, a slow crawl through faceless suburbs, and after a quick shop in Mercadona, ensconced again in Camping Ciudad de Zaragoza. Gill decided the place was peculiar.

Reviews on Google and Search for Sites were fair to middling, three things came up repeatedly, firstly, the facilities were 'tired'; secondly it was overpriced at €30 per night; finally the site was 'ok' as an overnight stop. I think we'd concur with all of that, especially the last bit. Because we stayed two nights we gained extra opportunities to discover irritating things about the place.

Nearby the sprawling modern suburb of Rosales del Canal looks like it was built in in the 1990s. The adjacent barren ground was developed as the the city's municipal campsite, also providing a pool and other sports facilities for the new community.

It's all very much of its time with lots of bare concrete, brushed steel and slatted wood, softened by hundreds of trees planted around the site. It's a good design, but three decades on the place is showing its age. Hence the word 'tired' in the reviews, but in the case of the sanitary blocks 'dysfunctional' might have been a better description. There was one exception to this, the pot-washing place was the finest I have come across in all the years we have travelled. As pot-washer in chief this pleased me inordinately.

Unlike the showers. Just to get things straight, I am not some weirdo who creeps about in the morning with his mobile taking photos of bathrooms. I found the photo below on a Google Maps review of the site.

As you can see the shower block contains small individual cubicles with a common changing area. This is more or less the norm in Scandinavia and not unknown in some older facilities on Spanish sites. However, in other places I have been with this set-up the hooks for your stuff have been either next to the cubicle or in a row on the wall opposite. Zaragoza's were in a cluster at one end of a row of showers - in a block, four hooks on one side of a bench four on the other side, one for each of the eight shower cubicles. A small difference in design, but it takes no imagination whatsoever to work out how awkward this becomes when the block is busy, especially as the washbasins on the opposite wall had big mirrors behind them.

I was lucky on day one, as I entered the shower block another guy was pulling on his tee shirt and exited before I undressed. Next morning began well enough, the place was busier with five cubicles or so in use, clothes hanging-up on some hooks but nobody about. A different vision greeted me when I finished my shower, a couple of guys drying themselves. I joined them, three others completed their ablutions, now there was a gaggle of us gathered around the hooks, towelling away, all avoiding each other's gaze, and avoiding glancing towards the mirrored wall opposite. What the chap cleaning his teeth at the one of the washbasins made of the scene I dare not imagine. Clearly it was too much for others. Three times the main door slid open, a guy entered, paused momentarily, then marched straight back out again.

"How was your shower?" Gill enquired when I got back to the van. 

"Memorable." I replied. 

How you evaluate a place is very circumstantial, it only takes a couple of 'off moments' to colour your perception then everything seems annoying. However, Zaragoza's campsite did seem prone to the peculiar. For example, on our first evening around nineish we heard a low, industrial sounding hum, then it became a whine, like a turbine in the distance, sometimes mid pitched then higher as if its speed was fluctuating wildly. "I hope they don't work all night", Gill observed.

In the end curiosity got the better of me and I wandered off to see what was going on. I didn't have to go far. About 50 metres away in front of one of the camping bungalows a lone figure was just discernable in the darkness. He was sitting on a bicycle mounted on a frame, pedalling furiously, the faster he went the higher pitched the whine became. Our slumbers were safe, there was no way he could do this for very long at all.

Back inside, on Google - there were two possibilities. He was a van lifer with an abnormal commitment to sustainability and had taken to recharging his leisure batteries through pedal power. It's a thing apparently, spawning a clutch of inadvertently funny YouTube videos from the US featuring sad men with beards full of advice on how to repurpose a scrap exercise bike and a cycle frame to generate electricity.

The second possibility is we had a wannabe Jason Kenny next to us and what we were hearing was a 'Turbo trainer', a device developed to build a professional cyclists' stamina by attaching a racing bike to magnetically resistant rollers designed to mimic varying gradients. Next morning on the side of a van parked nearby I noticed the logo of a cycling team. Mystery solved!

Then there is the matter of Zaragoza's 'Top Gun' soundscape. When Gill was navigating us towards the campsite she noticed an enormous airport a few kilometres west of the city. About twice the area of Heathrow the place is divided between civil and military use. Passenger flights to Zaragoza are modest, as you would expect with an inland regional airport in Spain, but the place is a major European air cargo hub. Planes come and go 24/7.

The military aircraft were more infrequent but much louder, screaming overhead in small groups. I looked up the history of the place, it was built by USAF after a deal between Franco and the Americans in 1953. Since the mid 1990s it's been used solely by the Spanish air force and is home to the combat training school for its fleet of McDonnell Douglas EF18s. They seemed to be out in force while we were here. Given the situation in Ukraine the roar of combat aircraft is unsettling and saddening. Early one evening the van shook slightly and there was a distant echoey boom. Somewhere over the wide open spaces of Navarre an EF18 went supersonic.

As we packed-up to leave Gill observed, 'our time here has been a bit weird'. I think so too. Would we come back? Like most other people who left a review, we agreed maybe only as an overnight stop. In truth there are few other options in the vicinity, and if you are scooting towards the Med near Valencia then Zaragoza is an obvious place to break your journey. If we do return I'll probably use our onboard shower.