Christmas Day Night, Boxing Day Morning

This is a weather report, last night we were hit by an offshore gale that drove some of the campers on the shoreline to retreat back to the walls and terraces. On the day we arrived we parked on the shoreline, and after about half an hour I got antsy because I was worried about being hit by an `onshore’ storm, and so we came up three levels. We were protected from the worst of it, but in terms of buffeting, it made the night we spent at the Harrisons in Somerset during the hurricane feel like no more than a breeze.

With only eighteen inches of camper body exposed to the full force of the wind, still on at least half a dozen occasions it felt like we were going to be blown over.

We have taken some photos of the weird effects of the storm on the sea at sunrise. Now at 1pm it’s still blustery but the sea is going in the right direction, the sky is blue and the sea is a turquoise of stunning clarity. The pictures aren’t blurred that’s the familiar rolling surf here being blown backwards and shredded to spray. The distant lumpy looking shots are of spray whirlwinds a long way offshore (we were hoping for a water spout).

Draft and Typos

We seem to be having trouble with the internet at our current location, and blogger is spazzing out frequently. I just looked at our previous post. It's the typo ridden draft before Amanda has sanity checked me. I've tried to correct it, but it seems to be set in cyber stone.

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.

The Discomforts ... or: Intimate Crevices and the Maintenance of ... or: Where Moisture Shouldn’t be, Discomfort Follows.

During the long drive through the mountains of Santander and across the high plains of Northern Spain there was little time to stop or pay attention to hygiene other that basic face splashing and teeth brushing. This has two negative effects:

1. Intimate crevices get sweaty.
2. Armpits get smelly.

This means that after around 48 hours one gets irritation of aforementioned parts. Deodorant is overwhelmed by a mixture of sweat, and food smells passed out of pores. Skin that is usually dry and fresh gets saturated and dead skin cells congeal with sweat and the body’s own bacteria to form a smelly paste that then irritates the still living skin below, causing what all parents of newborns know as `nappy rash’. The longer you remain grotty the worse things get until the van smells like a teenagers bedroom, and itching becomes so fierce one could draw blood from scratching. I wonder if after a while the body adjusts to these vicissitudes (homeless people must suffer the same effects at first)? I once had to spend a fortnight between back surgeries being turned every two hours manually by nurses. I was too embarrassed as a teenager to let them know I was sore between my legs, until things became unbearable and I had to tell them that there was something wrong. Bed sores and a scab of some sort that effectively covered both my inner thighs and a large area of my scrotum, this had to be soaked off with warm saline and then had to be attended to for several days afterwards. We have been nowhere near this in terms of discomfort, but it reminds me that keeping clean is essential.

In the overall scheme of things one should be able to use the onboard facilities to shower and clean. However as we are fairly new to the entire process and we were pushed for time we decided that we would push on and suffer the indignities, in the hope of a brighter tomorrow and a shower (this we have done in the UK as well though, rather through cold than distance to be travelled).  It does all end well, and hygiene is restored, but it is a sobering lesson in how much we rely on the comforts of home and a base.

Having a shower in the van is a process, especially in camper stops, where we have to chain our waste water tank (for security) to our step and then hump it to the grey water disposal point. The balance you strike is between preserving your gas for cooking or using it to heat water to wash. Until we find a gas supply in our host country we are stuck (if that’s the right word) with a British Butane setup (Calor Gas). Camping Gaz is the default last reserve, 4kilos of, and we can carry two bottles. At some point we will need to purchase a new gas adaptor for the Spanish bottles and then connect it to our Gaslow system (which is universal). The actual bottle heads are not, and Paul Studley who did the conversion said he thinks there are fifteen different types all across Europe (all except Camping Gaz which is universally available but limited in size). The learning curve continues as we travel.

It’s not just us that get moisture that can’t be allowed to accumulate. There are (despite my attempts to insulate the van to the max), condensation issues in the van. Mostly the windscreen that by design can’t be double glazed. There are also small cold bridges (places where the van allows heat out and the metal cools to the external ambient temperature) allowing condensation to form on the inside of the van (mainly around door and window seals and rubbers). This was always going to be an issue regardless of efforts to mitigate the effects (purpose built motor home have less issues within the habitation area).

So these are the routines, where once we got up brushed teeth showered etc and went to work; now we get up, wipe moisture, wring cloths, turn cushions to allow any damp to evaporate before mildew or the worse Black Mould forms on the material and timber of the carcass, and then we look after ourselves.

In some ways it’s a bit primitive, and I’m glad I learned a long time ago from Ray Mears and John ‘Lofty’ Wiseman books, that these things we do are work, for all calories spent we achieve something. In the world of convenience shops, grocery deliveries, hot water on tap all the time, electricity without the need for batteries and driving motion we are totally inured to how hard life must be for those stuck between the modern world and the world of bushmen. I’m thinking specifically of refugees, from war zones and poverty, and with a little pondering it is very easy to understand the mechanics of both longer life expectancy through evolutions in hygeine and medicine  in the first world and mortality among the dispossessed and occupants of the third world, who have no choice as we have in our fully fitted mobile habitat.

Plain Sailing

Well we crossed the Bay of Biscay, ate onboard ship in the best restaurant (and for someone who knows Seasickness as well as I do, I slept like log). I’ve been to the sea before, a week here and a week there inshore on the border between swell and waves, SCUBA diving along the South Coast from Plymouth west. Seasickness accompanied me on almost all occasions (if you haven’t been seasick you can’t understand how ill it makes you feel, or how the thought of jumping overboard is almost preferable to enduring it). This journey across the Ocean was almost blissful, a big boat, a bit wobbly here and there, spacious cabin and all mod cons (except electricity for charging the phone).

I awoke on the Wednesday morning feeling quite spry ... Amanda was feeling rough, too much vino with dinner. I got dressed and went outside for a walk. The sky had cleared overnight and I slowed my pace down because I wanted to savour the moment when I popped my head around the from the west facing side to the East so I could enjoy the blue sky and risen sun. At that moment it was possible to imagine a world sea and threw a penny in (so that for as long as there is sea over that bit of land, I will have left a mark and a wish, and one impossible day in a future we can’t imaging there is every likelihood that that bit of land beneath the sea will one day be the top of a mountain ... though it could equally be subducted and turned into molten rock).

There was no land in sight as there had been once or twice as we tracked around the Brest Peninsula, (lights from shore and lighthouses keeping our mariner host off of the rocks. I walked , around the three decks that are open to the ocean (I should mention I’ve never been on an ocean before, the Maldives doesn’t count they’re Atolls, even if they do rsde in the Indian Ocean) . I stood and looked out across the midnight blue water west and wondered at the vastness of the sea and that there were probably several thousand miles of open water between where I looked out and the next landfall.

You may have gathered I was a bit excited.

I went back to the cabin and got Amanda up with promises of sun and fresh air, and off we both went again. That bit in the morning, three hours, shower, walk, wonder, breakfast, and finally through my sunglasses noticing that the funny looking clouds down on the horizon, weren’t clouds, but the mountains of northern Spain. Watching the ship plough through the water the mountains losing their ghostly cloud like appearance and solidifying into ... mountains marching west along the coast, ranked backwards from the shore, some verdant and green and others high peaked and white. I had to write it this evening before it was lost. All the fear and angst from the previous days was washed away, because right there in front of us was a beach with someone walking along it, the sun was out and the breeze, though strong was warm, and of course looking at the sun, it appeared just that bit higher in the sky than back in the UK ... dare I say April height.

Flying is impersonal, tedious and soulless unless you’re the one dong the flying. In going by sea I’ve discovered a whole new travel medium, there is real tension, a view that develops a landscape that grows.

Once in Santander, I had butterflies, I was worried about making a boo boo on the rod and falling foul of the law or just crashing into something. However the way the port makes you exit, actually prepares you for the road (except left turn across carriageway ... did that one on the real road when the Satnav sent us into the wilderness), there is oncoming traffic, three small roundabouts and parking, which seemed to be where lots of people stopped for the purposes of setting coordinates into SatNavs, including us.

Then we were off on the open road out the port. We picked an Aire thirteen miles out of town `Carbarceno’. It is to all intents and purposes the overspill carpark for a wildlife park. We have Elephants no more than fifty meters to our offside. We are in a bowl of some mountains, and Carbarceno itself is a very pretty traditional Spanish Village of maybe three streets, with four bar come restaurants in its centre and one small shop selling odds and sods of essentials.

We walked around the town, then went into the only bar that was open and had a beer. We think it may liven up in the evening but we’ll  be in the land of nod for a relatively early start towards Zaragosa and our second stop, before we get to the east coast.

We’d been in the bar for half an hour or so when another English couple turned up. They were in Carbarceno, for an overnight stay before heading back to the UK via Santander and Poole. They told us of snow up near Madrid, and that they had driven eight hours and four hundred miles from Barcelona to reach our Aire. We made small talk, swapped notes on local news and weather and then went back to our respective tin boxes to do dinner. And now Amanda is scanning theAires book, and a map, to find us somewhere to stay for Silly season while I type. It’s 19.15 and we’ll probably be in bed by 20.30, because without hook-up, we need to conserve our battery for lighting, the pump, and if it gets too cold (the daytime warm has been blown away) the fan for the diesel heater.

Our jobs tomorrow include getting a tank full of diesel and driving approximately two hundred to two hundred and fifty miles east.