To Spain and Back Part One

My wife Barbara had a moment of madness in December 2010 “ I know where we can go next year, we’ll go and visit our Michael”.  So I sort of agreed as a way of pacifying her, because our Michael just happens to live in Coin just 16 miles from Marbella Southern Spain and to my mind one hell of a long way to drag a caravan, me being the only driver to boot.

Before long all the arrangements were made, over night stops this side of the channel booked, ACSI card bought, prepaid card loaded with Euro, ferry Dover Dunkirk booked out and return.  European maps updated on the sat-nav new European road atlas purchased, car and caravan fully serviced.  We were now in the lap of the gods, what could go wrong!

Set off on the 18^th March for our first stop near Bicester, sited the van turned on the gas nothing, yep the regulator had failed.  Red Pennant put me in touch with a mobile repairer who flatly refused to come out, Red Pennant had no other repairers they could recommend, fortunately the site owner directed me to Bicester Caravans who fitted the caravan into their schedule for the Saturday morning, one hour later we were on our way again with a nice new shiny gas regulator, and £85 less spending money.  Arrived at the Dover site to be told she had booked us in for the week previous, and had us down for a no show, however we kissed and made up and she allowed us to stay.  Two things gone wrong what was going to be the third, not that I’m suppositious you understand.

Arrived in France and found it to the first site without mishap or getting lost due to the expert guidance of my navigator and map reader Barbara.  As we hadn’t booked any sites we were a little apprehensive as to how the ACSI system would work. We need not have worried we were booked in and sited within twenty minutes, worked like a dream.  Which continued all the way through France, we found that by covering between two hundred to two hundred and fifty miles between sites we had plenty of time to find a site and be settled well before nightfall.  That was until we arrived at the only site supposedly open at Carcassone to find it closed, fortunately another Brit was there who said he knew of another site and if we wished to follow he would show us where it was.  By this time it was starting to go dark but having no option we continued to follow until we arrived in Limoux where I had to fill up with fuel, it was here that we parted company thanking him for his help and on his way he went. Nothing ventured nothing gained I asked at the garage if there was a caravan site in the area, and the young assistant directed me to one not half a mile away.  Unfortunately it too was closed but the guy in charge took pity on us and let us stay overnight, the water was turned off but we were welcome to hook up to the electricity, result, a quick nip round to the garage, five litres of water and we were soon fed and watered.  Best of all, the warden wouldn’t take any money for the site fee, who said the French were a miserable lot, there again he may have been Dutch his accent was a little strange.

On the following morning we decided to follow the D118 to Quillan and then the D117 to Perpignan and on towards Barcelona, two nights at a site in Mataro allowed us to rest and recuperate before tackling the coastal road of Spain to Malaga and beyond