The Road to Peniscola (Penis Cola tee hee hee).

14.5 kilometres to Peniscola (pen- ISC-ola) ancient fort town, circa 13^th Century, along a` road’ ... in the broadest sense of the word from Ribimar.

The Tower Marking the Blind Spot

First Sight of Peniscola

A Bush Shaped Like a Giant Nob

From Whence we Came

This road runs along the seaboard face of the Sierra Del Irta National Park and will never be made, except the switch back section up an eighty metre or so mount upon which an ancient guard tower stands, bleached and blasted white by dust and salt) before reverting back to petrol tank scratching, ball breaking, wheel spinning aggregate.

View Panoramica

The Mountains we Cycled Past

Dropped Down to Sea Level (for a bit)

The tower looks south down the coast to which Peniscola would be blind (the direction we came from). Once it would have provided advance warning to Peniscola should marauders or invaders have sought that towns blind side, with the quick wind filling their sails and the one or two shallow bays before the mount, where those invaders could beach their ships and march the coastal path downhill (mostly) to the town (though to be fair they would still have to f*%@ing mad to do it ... glad I’m not a suicidal 13^th century soldier looking for glory in the next life by getting well and truly killed in this one).

Looking north the 3.5 kilometres as the crow flies from the old watch tower (8.5 along the road, it’s that twisty) to Peniscola, the cliffs rise almost vertically from the sea. Only the ancient harbour would allow safe landing for those visiting the port on legitimate business, and one assumes the beach beyond, where ships could be careened or beached. The old walled towns buildings gleam white in the midday sun, rising to meet the old Templar Castle, with its buff walls parapets and stair cases only shoulder wide, steep enough to kill a falling man or stall a charge. Here and there those walls bare the scars of artillery fire; football sized pockmarks in blocks of stone dressing a cliff. I have no idea if those shots were badly aimed or deliberate. What I do know is that those shots were wasted utterly on walls that in some places are two metres thick, and as noted above literally just dress the under lying rock.

I suppose in my ignorance; having never been subjected to a barrage of cannon ball fire, I can't imagine what it was like for those inside the walls when cannon balls hit. However, when the gunfire ceased I think I would have been happier to be inside than out.

They Must have Been Slim 700yrs ago

The strategic importance of the castle (I think) is highlighted by the fact that the much more modern lighthouse, is set so much lower down the sea facing side of the town on what may have been a castle precinct sometime in the past.

A Very Pretty Town

The road itself was tough. The going there was hard enough but exciting because all that lay ahead was undiscovered. The return was nearly, very nearly a nightmare. The wind had been building in all day, and sped us forward. On the return, that same wind was in our face (the forecast had predicted the wind to turn ... it did, the following morning). The wind was shearing along the seafront from the south, turbo rolled along the escarpment into a gusting, dust hurling forcefield that defied low gears and in addition to the long steady gradients that eventually stopped me dead in my tracks, turning my bike into a wheeled walking stick and faithful leaning post. My quadriceps eventually cramped under minimal load; forcing me to kneel at the roadside to stretch, without inducing calf cramps. This so I could then walk the gradual but lengthy inclines to the next downhill stretch of track, and then roll, brakes on down what can be described as scree, dust and nubs of boulder jutting shiny and smooth from the car width path. Amanda took a fall when we were literally a mile from home, and boofed her wrists and knee, and collected some nice gritty road rash.

Oops

However and it’s a big however Peniscola (Penis cola tee hee hee) was worth it. It is a tiny walled town, maybe only as big as the Tower of London and its immediate precincts and moat, perched on a point of land between the rocky jagged coast of Alcossebre and Amposta (where the rice paddy is found).  It’s a real window onto a past we can’t even begin to imagine, important enough to have been augmented and maintained by kings and popes, and in use up until the Spanish civil war.

We revisited the place with the car a few day later, and took some more pictures, which we will post shortly.

The Journey

This was mostly going to be photos ... but. From Santander, through the (to our eyes) Alpine Basque region, up through the mountains and then across the cold seemingly endless plains of Northern Spain and then down onto the East Mediterranean coast and a seven day stop to allow for Christmas ... an actual holiday, there were some things a picture alone couldn't tell.

These are the voyages of the Moho, Moho.

The mountains to the North east are lush and green, there are Oaks and Alders and Poplars, Plains and Beech all doing what deciduous trees do at this time of year, namely shedding leaves and baring their branches to the winds and rains. There are conifers as well: Scots Pine, Stone Pine and Cypress (and lots of others I couldn’t begin to name without a magnifying glass and my Mitchells Guide), both wild and cultivated edging fields and highways. There are wild grown woody slopes and regimented plantations. Where these two types of wood sit on opposite sides of a highway, but on exactly the same gradient and terrain the managed woods look so odd compared to the giant broccoli covered slopes they oppose (there are very few straight lines in nature).

Santander

Out of the woods and mountains (where we nearly boiled the vans engine climbing the mountains) we crested the final hill (not that we knew it at the time), and let the Moho cool down for twenty minutes, heater and fans full on, windows wound down, engine still running. There is a strange place of transition up there, the woods peter out, the signs warning of snow or ice disappear, and the traffic thins to virtually nothing (not that there is a huge amount in the first place, just what there is, is enormous ... huge HGV’s hauling Timber and who knows what). This is the high road from Santander to Bilbao and beyond and the start of the vines. For forty miles they stretch along the road on both sides, and to the limit of your vision, a vast monoculture of grape, no trees, just rust coloured soil in great flat fields or walled terraces, home to possibly millions of stubby pruned vines. Far to the north and far to the south higher mountains capped with snow enclose and isolate this arid looking environment.

We have left Kansas

Sign telling us the Greenwich Meridian is ahead

The Greenwich Meridian in the middle of Nowhere

It was like this a lot

Really a lot

At Bilbao we managed through a foolish attempt to avoid paying tolls to get routed through the city. A long way from the transporter bridge or anything worth seeing or stopping for. We were just stuck in a commercial district, among a confusion of pedestrians, weird traffic lights, one way systems, and road works. They are doing a lot of road work in Bilbao, and the Satnav gets very confused. In the end I used the Force ... well I just bullied my way to high ground, away from the madding crowds, and in the end the Satnav found our elusive motorway, and we were off again, we’d lost an hour or more, with more than a hundred miles to go.

You can almost see the smell

Out of Bilbao, back up to the plains and vines, the Rioja region and maybe another eighty miles of grape, interspersed here and there with  fruit trees that I think may have been cherry, and wind eroded rocky outcrops. We saw huge birds of prey gyring and soaring, or hovering like our own Kestrels near the roadside, and once one flew beside us at head height to the Moho’s cab.

We eventually arrived at Cascant a tiny town with an Aire 45 miles east north east  of Zarragosa, just as the sun set, which meant the last ten minutes of the drive was done in darkness. This was our halfway point and having driven over two hundred miles we needed a walk.

We mooched the streets of Cascant in the dark, a strange mix of ancient and modern in such a small place. Streets barely a car or cart width wide, an ancient monastery castle with a cleverly designed cobbled slope with steps. A central courtyard in the oldest part of the town where five lanes met in an ancient central precinct, a crowd of people were gathering outside a church. We passed a building from which a familiar noise came to my ears, the unmistakable noise of a swimming pool, and a feint whiff of chlorine. We picked up a prepared Paella mix from a tiny Supermarket, were the locals looked at us like beings from another world. We bought fresh milk for Amanda from a street vending machine, having bought a litre bottle for it to be dispensed into from another vending machine adjacent, and then we wandered back to the van to eat and then get our heads down.

Beside us in the car park Aire were two other Motorhomes, both bearing British plates, we didn’t see the occupants. By the time we got ourselves together the following morning both were gone. Though to be fair to us, we also made an earlier start, being on the road around 9am local time. We filled up with diesel at a filling station I’d spotted the night before, and then we hit the toll road again, for another 231 miles, through more grape and later more fruit almost exclusively as we came down slowly from the plateau.

Around fifty miles from the end of the mad dash, the landscape changed as the plain started to descend to the sea properly (though the cliffs behind us are still at least 900ft tall, maybe 1200ft at the highest).

From barren seeming monoculture interspersed by rocky uncultivated plain, we started to see at first scrub, then trees ... those familiar with Spain’s Costa’s and Islands will picture a landscape and it’s trees ... that’s the one we were descending into. I noticed the Moho’s Engine noise had changed to a purr rather than a low growl. I checked my watches barometer and air pressure was back above a 1000millibar, and all the long straight sections of road seemed to be inclining down, some of them steeply, with a requirement for low gears. And then all of a sudden we came upon civilisation, cars and lorries again, intersections, bridges, viaducts, a huge refinery of some kind, railway lines and precipitous drops away from the road, and bends and switchbacks .. thankfully fenced in, giving one the psychological edge one needs to avoid straying into the lane of oncoming traffic on the opposite side of the road.

And finally we’d dropped to maybe only 300 feet above sea level, the gantry cranes of Tarragona visible above unseen docks a few miles to our east, some other heavy industry adjacent. We drove around the outskirts of Tarragona towards Hospitalet Del Infante and our final destination for now. A near empty campsite, with rolling surf when air pressure is low and that jaw dropping Mediterranean blue when calm descends again.
It’s Christmas day as I write this. Earlier the German contingent of motorhomers left on mass, leaving us and maybe five other units, to the grey day with huge rolling waves; miniatures of those you see on surfer beaches, but no less dramatic or exciting for that.

We will do as near to a traditional English Christmas dinner, including Sprouts for later today, nod to our remaining neighbours, feed our myriad feathered friends and walk the beach.

Chicken thighs wrapped in bacon, with Sweet Chestnuts and potatos (hob then oven)

For some of these things you will have to take our word, because stopping to take pictures wasn’t possible, either because we lacked a hard shoulder to pull over onto, or we were pressed for time in the headlong dash to warmer climes.

Weekends Away

After months of intense work, and a wet non- summer without relief, we finally got to use the motorhome for what it was intended for ... travel to out of the way places, stop a while, muck about on the beach or country paths, cook, eat, ... tiddle in comfort without having to walk to a toilet block 50yards away ... sleep in the buff and get your legover without fear of the occupants of neighbouring tents seeing your silhouettes cast against the skin of the tent from the inside, making the beast with two backs or hearing the two minutes of frantic grunting and rustling associated with such nocturnal activities; I used to camp ... I know these things. ... I’ve seen the mine and another’s shadow cast on the inner flysheet and thought “Oh fuck I hope she doesn’t cotton on to the porno shadow show we’re creating”, and then being a bloke just having a chuckle to myself because getting your legover in public affirms your masculinity and proves your alphaness ... I like to think.

So I’m writing this after a jolly three nights away, having completed several cycle rides (nothing too far ... we found out how out of shape we were) and two short and cold swims in the September sea of Southwold Suffolk ... and one of those was a skinny dip. Walks, cycles and swims were all followed by some of the most expensive beers I’ve ever drunk in a pub or pubs ever. To say the least Southwold is expensive ... I’ve also renamed it Adnamsville, as that particular brewery is bang in the middle of town and appears to own or feed every pub there about. While it is quaint, with the air of such places as Salcombe and Charmouth; to whit, very salty and sailorish with a community that from overheard conversations and interactions “knows its own”... it is relatively speaking, a bit of a rip off.

I won’t bang on about it too much, but when a pint of the local brew, brewed less than a hundred yards from the hostelry said brew was consumed in and a large Gin and Tonic roll in at £10.25, you have to have the “I should have bought a slab of supermarket lager and had a beer in the motorhome” thought.

I at once sympathise with the pub industry for having to compete with supermarkets on a very unfair playing field, but on the other hand, looking across all of Southwolds retail sectors, food, clothes, drink ... tiddly whot knots, it’s just shooting itself in the foot. I have no idea what the answer is for the British economy overall; my mind simply can’t juggle that many balls, but from the start of this blog all I see is that sector after sector is fighting against either itself or allied sectors, and subsequently throttling itself with overpricing, or destroying itself with piss poor quality and in piss poor service delivery. There appears to be some form of loop back in the economy ... a Groundhog Day ... as I say I have no answers. I just see myself not going to pubs, because it’s a rip off, not going to hotels, because they are a rip off, only buying stuff that’s on sale or last season, because this year’s prices and models are a rip off, and between times making my own lunch as often as possible ... you guessed it; because a city lunch once, even on the cheap is at least as expensive as doing your own for two days.

Glossing over the fact that we spent more than seemed right in the Adnamsville pubs and didn’t shop at all for the simply laughable prices (perhaps we are just poor white trash and we weren’t supposed to be there at all ... you never know?). Southwold itself it is quite interesting. I shan’t list all of its history menu, or items of local interest. You can get an idea of what’s about there, here http://www.southwold.info though I will point out a few of our highlights:

·         The beach that runs near south to north from Southwold to Lowestoft is simply fabulous. Walking from the river Blyth where the campsite is along, through and beyond the beach holiday haven of the main town pier, amusements, prom, tea huts there is a near deserted strip of sand bordered by low cliffs. The Cliffs are maybe two stories high and fall gently to nearly sea level and a small salt marsh and reed bed three miles up, by which time there isn’t another soul around (hence swimming in the buff rather than walking back in wet clothes ... practical nakedness). The cliffs then rise again to about three stories and are covered with a mix of what looks like deliberate tree planting (big Cedars, and pines) and dead wood (that I imagine was once someone’s pride and joy). But as the cliffs have receded via wave erosion, so the salt air and added wind exposure have done for some of the trees, and some have simply fallen from the cliffs to form drift wood relics ... the size of trees. Heading north along the beach like this and encountering only one or two other people on the way does give you a feel for how close most people stay to town even when they go away. It seems to me that the majority don’t see the point of just going to look at open space and having a nose without having a pre-set destination. You know just going because it’s there to be seen if you just put one foot in front of the other.

·         Within the town there is the Seamans Reading Room, a small building fronting the town perched on the cliff looking out to sea, part memorial part museum to the seamen of the area. There are pictures, models and books and written accounts from days of yore. The town has quite some naval and maritime history, the shore has been a wrecker, and once there was a sea battle fought along the coast.  If you pop in make sure you drop in what you can spare in the donations box (likewise at the pier).

·         The pier, a short very neat affair with several quality tut shops (that’s an oxymoron I know, but you’ll get it if you go), there’s a novel under the pier show (on top of the pier half way along). It’s a collection of alternative slot machines, a little too complicated to describe, your best bet is to pop along and have a look ... there’s also fishing off the pier with a permit, if you’re interested.

The campsite itself was functional, a little badly organised and laid out and the facilities were suffering from wear and tear (in some respects extremely so), taps being my personal biggest bugbear, because there was only one set of four that would stay on when the button on top was pressed in. The showers and loos were fine within the parameters allowed by being used by several hundred people all day long and most of the night from March to September. We were expecting it, because we read some reviews up front, however the next nearest site was a fair way in land and this was a good compromise.

The thing that irks about the campsite is that it’s owned and run by the council, the same council that runs the town, the town that is really expensive and looking for premium customers, the town that if it were run like the campsite, would be on its knees and not having any visitors ... perhaps Adnams should run the campsite ... but then who would be able to afford it? Foot shooting it’s a British national pastime me thinks.

We were a little lazy on this trip with regards to food and provisions and just being prepared. I had several days to get us ready, and yet failed miserably to use the anally retentive laminated lists I prepared to avoid such omissions as I will list below. We brought the absolute basics:  two ready meals I made before we left home, a pre-cooked pork joint from our local Asda, and some cereals and salads. Somehow we managed to forget desert size spoons, sugar, the milk we had in the fridge and bacon and chicken I’d taken out the freezer to thaw on the trip (helps the motorhome fridge cool quicker), we also didn’t pack our small frying pan ... all things being equal we’ve been a bit crap. However it’s not a cause for much stress, I think we’ve both survived with a lot less in similar situations, and I refer to my earlier comments; I’ve slept under canvas so having only one pan (a very good one that never leaves the Moho), plus a bog standard gas kettle and flask for hot water, aligned with all the other creature comforts, pretty much negates our short comings completely.

It may look at first glance as if we had a crap time, but the entire opposite is the case, we had a right old hoot, we got half cut with a bloke whose spent half his life in Sizewell B nuclear power station, we walked down an unlit B road with only a head torch for illumination, we swam in the sea, cycled, walked and caught the last of the summers proper sun ... great weekend thanks Shine.