Over the years we've seen Spain's 'Costas' become ever more crowded in the winter months with a marked increase in long stay retirees - a trend towards staying put rather than touring. It is still possible to wander about so long as you follow a few guidelines - phone or email ahead to check on availability; avoid moving on a Friday or Saturday in popular areas as places fill up with local weekenders; don't head for places on local holidays, saints days or popular carnivals. So what have we done over the last few days? That's right, we ignored all this sensible advice, and consequently life became needlessly tricky.
Last month sitting on a bar stool at our kitchen island, Google Maps on my tablet, Acsi book open, Search for Sites on my phone, it was easy to come up with a perfect plan. If we head for Valencia first, I conjectured, then we could be in the Cartegena area around Carnival week. I imagined spending a few days at one of the Acsi sites on the beautiful mountainous coast south of the city. Then we could move to the Camperstop on the outskirts of the city and lift our winter-grey spirits by watching the exuberant parade. All possible, but to have any kind of guarantee of making this a reality we would have needed to pre-book.
Howeve,r We were never going to do that weeks ahead, because we might find ourselves standing in the pouring rain watching hyperthermic samba dancers twerking in the drizzle, sadly shaking their bedraggled tail feathers. Carnivals require sunshine. With sunny days forecast to return we decided to head towards Cartegena anyway and see if we could book a site last minute.
We planned an overnight stop at a recently built area auto caravans just off the A33 motorway in the small town of Caudet. The place is in the Albacete region, so in Castilla la Mancha, but close to the borders of Valenciana and Murcia. It was a classic traditional Spanish country town, now developing because of the recently completed A33 inland motorway that now connects Valencia and Murcia more directly than the busy autovia Mediterraneo running along the coast.
The town's traditional roots were obvious as the area autocaravanas is situated about 100m from the enormous Toros Arenas de Caudete..
More recent developments include the stylish Mercadona supermarket on the edge of town..
the area autocaravanas itself...
and the jolly giant mural on the crumbling wall opposite our parking spot.
It's a better designed overnight stopping place than the somewhat scruffy and windswept area in nearby Yecla, though it is a little cramped. Our van is 7m long and we had to remove the bikes and fold up the rack to squeeze onto our pitch. Luckily not all of the bays opposite us were occupied, otherwise manoeuvring in and out would have been a tight squeeze too. But the place was free and the service point was fully functioning. We'd use it again.
We needed to find somewhere to stay for next few days. Gill phoned a couple of campsites on the coast south of Cartegena. The numbers just rang out. I attempted to book the same sites using their online reservation form. Los Madriles seemed to be booked solid, El Portus' website allowed reservations for their Bungalows and Safari tents but the 'parcelos' section was disfunctional. We abandoned the idea of staying around Cartegena around Carnival time and decided to head for the area autocaravanas at Puntas del Calnegre for a night, then push on south and spend a few days in the Los Escullos site in the Cabo de Gata national park.
It was Groundhog Day last week apparently. We seem to be going through something similar. Here we are parked in the area autocaravanas near the pleasingly ramshackle village of Puntas del Calnegre. When we first stopped here in 2014 it felt like a disregarded scrap of nowhere in particular.
It still is a scrap of nowhere in particular, but not so disregarded. Year by year plasticulture cover the littoral. In recent years an additional area autocaravanas has been established next to the older ramshackle one we've used for years. It has ehu and a shower block and has become a Mecca for the owners of monster Cathargos, Morellos and Concorde'. Scores of them, mainly German owned are drawn up along the coast. Mass tourism is never a pretty sight.
Last year and the year before we arrived here and asserted, "This is it, never again!" Yet, once more, here we are - see Groundhog day!
We needed diesel. Gill recalled there was a petrol station we'd used before in Aguilas, about 20kms south of here. We headed for there. The place runs a small area autocaravanas. Maybe if there's space we could stay there and watch the carnival at Aguilas rather than Cartegena's, we wondered. Both events are world famous. Even at noon traffic was heavy on the Aguilas ring road. As we drove along the coast road we noticed dozens of motorhomes wild camping among the dunes. There's no way there's going to be space at area autocaravanas, we speculated. That turned out to be the case, but at least now we had a full tank of diesel.
We decided to head south towards the Cabo de Gata. Continuing the theme of the moment - forget everything you've learned about motorhoming over the last fourteen years - we were arriving at Los Escullos campsite on a Saturday afternoon, the least likely time for the place to have any vacant pitches. In the event they had two going spare, both too small to accommodate a 7m van. We booked in for four nights starting from the following day.
Fortunately we had driven past Cabo de Gata Camper Park on the way here. It's located outside the national park amongst the plasticulture, but at least we had somewhere to stay overnight. It's a week since we landed in Santander. It hasn't been straightforward. We've made a big detour to avoid the devastating storms affecting western Iberia, we've both gone down with a fluey cold virus and at times struggled to find places to stay on crowded sites around the Golfo de Mazarron. We need to stop and recuperate. As Gill observed, 'its not a race
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