Why we are here versus not why we are here.

I am probably one of the least spontaneous people you are ever likely to encounter. I have chatted to fellow travellers who blithely assert that they simply go where they fancy, deciding on the spur of the moment what to do next . I find this very disturbing. 

It has occurred to me that I might be a bit OCD. However, although I have a tendency to become obsessed by things I am not compulsive, I don't mind if plans don't come to fruition, because it means I can happily anticipate coming up with a new one. So if this is a disorder then it's an undiagnosed 'over-planning syndrome' yet to be exploited by the mental health industry as a new moneymaking opportunity for enterprising therapists.

When I say that I have a tendency to over-plan I think I need to Illustrate how this works in practice. Right now I am mulling over where we are heading today - Mula! near Murcia. Simple enough, but when you come to look at the map I'm using it's covered in pink marker pen squiggles and lines and arrows with GPS co-ordinates scribbled beside them. 

This is the outcome of hours of painstaking work during lockdown when I marked every Via Verde cycle track in Spain on our Iberia road atlas using information from the excellent Google "My Maps", produced by someone just as nerdy as me. Then, consulting a variety of apps - 'Search for Sites', 'Campercontacts', and 'Park for Night', I noted places to stay adjacent to the trails. It took hours, but instructed by Mophead himself to 'Stay Home and save the NHS' time, unlike toilet rolls, Weetabix and lrnbru, was not something in short supply. 

Now we come to the two densely annotated blue Post-It notes. More over-planning! Our tunnel crossing is booked for three weeks hence; the question is how to get from here (Murcia) to Calais? There are two obvious routes. One takes you north from Valencia to the Rioja, across the Basque Country and north through the west of France. The alternative is to follow the Mediterranean coast, through Catalonia and Occitanie, then north through central France using the A75 free autoroute from Montpellier to Clermont Ferrand. Somewhat counter intuitively the Mediterranean route is the shorter of the two, but only by six miles! So really they're equidistant. From my point of view this is ideal, two near identical options, an opportunity for endless procrastination!

So, each route, stopping places identified, mileages calculated, Easter public holidays noted with a square, forecast daily temperatures recorded and rain days marked with little slanty lines - in the end it was the weather that proved to be the deciding factor - home via the Costa Brava and Languedoc it is.

This was not, as you now probably suspect, an off-the-cuff decision. We both take weather watching very seriously. This could have something to do with where we live. Buxton specialises in water - more than 68,000,000 plastic bottles of it sold annually by Nestlé in the UK. Alternatively, perhaps you might fancy sitting in its supposedly healthful H₂O, a romantic weekend in the Georgian splendour of the Crescent Spa hotel, two nights on a bed and breakfast basis a mere £685 according to Booking.Com. It's a trending place.

This week the Sunday Times including it in a list of the 10 best places to live in the UK. It's OK, but having lived there for 35 years we can tell you for sure that most of the town's celebrated water does not come in bottles or overpriced spa tubs, it falls out of the sky, day after day for weeks on end. Which is probably the main reason why we spend over four months of the year driving around southern Europe dodging raindrops.

As the years go by our rain avoidance techniques have become ever more sophisticated. I have the Accu weather and AEMET (Spanish) apps on my phone, Gill's has the BBC and France Meteo. Each has a slightly different approach, Accu weather is good for long range forecasts, AEMET's cloud and rain radar will tell you what's likely to happen in the next hour or two. We've weather watched like this for years. However, in December we discovered the Met Office's YouTube channel. Tuesday's 'Deep Dive' and Wednesday's 'Ten Day Trend' are more in-depth and give the layperson a glimpse into the science behind forecasting. In particular they often give a satellite view of the North Atlantic showing the track of the jetstream. 

This view includes Iberia and is really useful as it gives us an inkling as to the general trend - settled or stormy - for the next week or two.

Twice over the last couple of months the jetstream has 'south shifted' and the Atlantic lows that make Britain's winter weather wet and unpredictable tracked across Iberia and the western Med. The Deep Dive's' bird's eye view helps us plan whether to stay put or head elsewhere.

This got me thinking about what exactly does shape our journeys. The weather yes, but I do think they are shaped by a mix of predilections and dislikes. We seek out some things and contrive to avoid others. It's a kind of implicit, hidden 'Heels for Dust' travel algorithm.

So, why we are here...

1. Sunny days
2. Unfrequented coasts
3. Empty roads through a varied landscapes
4. Lovely towns and cities yet to become social media hot spots.
5. A café culture offering delicious, inexpensive local dishes at lunchtime

Not why we are here...

1. Tricky driving - urban Mario cart, asphalted donkey tracks (sat-nav fails). 
2. Sites designed for nothing larger than a vintage VW camper - minescule pitches, narrow terraced access roads, low branches, scratchy hedges ..
3. Places where tourists outnumbered locals.
4. Moho service points designed by people who have never driven a motorhome - in other words most of them.
5. Rain.

So, in the tradition of bullshit bingo if we award a point each thing in the first list and deduct a point for things in the second then simply achieving a positive score would be a 'not bad result', 3+ would be pretty good and 5 very rare indeed. Have we had any 5s on this trip? Perhaps the drive on day two from Salamanca to Aljucen, our time in Sagres and the Markadia campsite by the lake. Otherwise, it's all been a bit 'not bad', principally because it has rained more frequently than on any of our previous winter trips.

Typical was our recent trip to Ronda, so profoundly 'not bad ' that I only mentioned it in passing a couple of posts ago. Despite it being the most visited of Andalusia's many celebrated pueblos blancos it's taken us a decade to get around to visiting it. The main reason is every time we've considered visiting the place, when I've looked at the road atlas, both the A-397 north from Marbella and the eastern route through the hills from Puerto Serrano looked a bit bendy and hair-raising. Add to that the place's popularity on Instagram. We chose not to visit it because it seemed a tricky drive to somewhere that had all the hallmarks of being an over-hyped tourist trap.

Maybe I was just being contrary. Heading east from Gibraltar we would pass the junction to Ronda. The area autocaravanas on the north side of the town had positive reviews and the famous historical centre, situated either side of a spectacular gorge, only a 2km walk. 

We decided to do it. So, using the somewhat spurious scoring system we have just invented how did Ronda fare? Starting with the positives:

 It was sunny, the road was quiet and the scenery spectacular.

The tapas lunch we had at a cafe was excellent. 

So overall - 3/5. 

So far as the negatives go it was less clear cut. 

The A-397 is very bendy, often has a cliff on one side and deep drain gullies on the other. However the mountains are beautiful and much of the road has a 60kph speed limit, double white lines and people stick to the rules. 

Away from the touristy bit Ronda is a pleasant lively place, it feels prosperous, and anywhere that chooses to celebrate its youngest citizens in four storey high murals has to be admired.

The old town is a tourist trap packed with tour groups herded around famous viewpoints by radio miked guides. 

However the geology of the gorge is spectacular...

Away from the crowded 'miradors' there are quieter spots in the terraced gardens that are tranquil and less frequnted. It is a special place, reminiscent of Matera at times in the way the built environment has been shaped by geology. 

So far as the area autocaravanas is concerned, it's well managed and has good facilities. It is very busy and the bays are small, a tight squeeze for a 7m van. 

Also, the access to place takes you through a residential neighborhood, a complicated grid of one way streets. I can't imagine the locals are too happy about the constant moho coming and goings. 

So a score of 3/5 on the negative side too. 

So overall a zero, almost 'not bad'! Was it worth the effort to visit Ronda? Probably. Will we return? Probably not.