Day 7 — Tuesday 3 May 2011

Alcolea del Rio – San Nicolas del Puerto

I came down to the bar for desayuno and the barman waved away my profer of payment so breakfast was free. Let's hear it for the truck stop at Alcolea! Suitably sustained I set off for Lora del Rio along the dead flat A436 following the big river. I had originally intended to go North East up the SE6100 and probably it would have been a more attractive route, and not all that more hilly, but I wimped out. At Lora I left the main road and went in search of a bank. I asked a lady for directions and she pointed me up a side street, which I followed only to get lost, and came out of a side road only to bump into the same lady again. She looked a bit exasperated and set me on the right track again. A functioning hole-in-the-wall dispensed lots of nice cash. I found a large supermarket and stocked up with bananas and other essential supplies for the road.

From Lora I turned North up the rising A455 for Constantina where I arrived pretty much exhausted at 1:30 p.m. just as the restaurants were opening. I have no recollection of the restaurant or the town itself, as my diary has no description of either, just that the food I chose turned out to be not very filling. At lunch time there is often no printed menu, just the waiter coming round with a sribbled list of today’s offer. My usual method of selection was to listen for anything that sounded like meat and then say “Si” enthusiastically, and for the most that worked a treat.

I got to San Nicolas and found the camp site sign but as far as I could see it took me off the metalled road onto a grassy footpath at the bottom of a twisting lane. I retraced my tracks to the centre of the village and asked in a bar, and after a bit spotted the words via verde. “Oh Hell!”, I thought, “it’s off-road.” Back I went down to the grassy track and crossed a hump-back packhorse bridge to find a roughly painted arrow and a triangular sign that probably stood for a tent on the side of a barn. The track turned into quite a respectable unmetalled surface of loose chippings that I bumped along for a couple of miles until finally coming to a group of buildings and a campsite nestling in a small valley by a splashing stream. I was the only person there so went to pitch my tent. I returned to what looked like the campsite office and eventually a chap turned up from a caravan I had not spotted, saying that there was no toilet paper and the proprietor was round the back of her cottage. After a bit of searching around we found her and she took my details and I paid my fee for the night.

I and the caravanner were definitely the only people on the site and it was too early in the season for the café-bar to be open. The hot water for the showers was from a solar powered heating unit that fortunately was functioning (after a fashion) and I swept the huge dead black beetles out of a shower and cleaned myself up. I went to sit in the evening sun on the veranda overlooking the site and wrote up my diary and sent a text message to Liz, but didn't get a reply. I think she must have been at her German class.

If the place had not been so run down it could have been really attracive, which was a disappointment. By eight o’clock the sun was about to dip behind the ridge so I turned in.