Friday 9 January 2015

A beautiful morning and warmer than the last few! As we plan to be off-grid tonight spent a few minutes making sure the water tank was full and waste empty before getting back on the autovia, heading for Granada.

Fuel was our first priority so pulled in quite soon and gave it a tankful of the “good” stuff. It costs a little bit more than regular but it helps to keep everything running nice and smoothly, and we seem to go better too.

Well that’s the official story – in reality I picked up the wrong refilling gun………

Having decided that as again we would only be driving for 3hrs or so, we wouldn’t stop for lunch. Round the Granada Ring, far easier than Madrid, then on to Malaga, where the roads became much busier as we joined the Autovia de la Mediterranea.

Although we’ve booked a (discounted) ferry crossing to Tangiers with an agency in Algeciras, it was interesting to note that there were ticket agencies officially signposted all the time we’ve travelled today, up to 300km away! In Arabic too!

Our destination was an aire just past Fuengirola, as we are not due to our campsite at Estepona until tomorrow. Basically it is just a large open parking area with no facilities, but no charge either. There were already between 50 and 75 vans parked, some looking to have been here for a while so we were pleased to note that there was access for waste, although it did look a bit unofficial!

A snack and relax with books for a couple of hours before T wandered along to a Lidl 500m up the road to replenish beer stocks that we forgot yesterday. Then catch up with the paperwork and blog.

We haven’t mentioned it before but Terry has been coordinating a group of fellow motorhomers, via the internet, from the MotorhomeFun forum which includes several who have not been to Morocco before. The list was “closed” at 12 vans and inevitably there have been some dropouts but which have also been replaced. Then today as we parked up, one of our number reported in as broken down – and seconds later we got a text from yet another, entirely unconnected, wanting to join. Keeping track is, to say the least, interesting!

Now we’re out of the mountains and the sun is shining out of a clear blue sky we can at last throw off the jumpers, although as I write it is getting dark and the temperature is cooling off a bit.