Brits, bingo, buoyancy, boobies - and ostriches

The road between Tarifa and Alicante is one long strip of hotels.  Very nice if you need one (and don’t mind crossing a dual carriageway and a railway line to get to the beach - that’s town planning in the Franco era for you), but not so good if you’re an impoverished campervanner just looking for somewhere quiet and peaceful to park up for the night.  On the Costa del Sol it does seem to be campsites or nothing.  

Luckily my sister Lin had given us her ACSI camping guide when we’d met up near Calais.  That seems like months ago now (and is – what on earth have we been doing?), but this book has really come into its own since we left France:  we have almost-reliable knowledge - and sometimes even GPS co-ordinates - of campsites open all year round.  To camper-vanners in Spain, that’s not far short of the Holy Grail.  

However, the sites we’ve stayed on have been a bit peculiar - little fenced off corners of scrubland in the back of beyond, mostly; also hugely expensive but absolutely chock-full of vans with GB plates.  It's nice to speak your mother tongue to someone other than your partner from time to time, but it’s also a bit weird to go for a short stroll round a site and come back to find your windscreen festooned with flyers advertising Brenda’s Marmalade Just Call in At Pitch 39, or the fact that there’s a Proper Pub Quiz Every Wednesday 7.30 in the Bar.    Other campers also seemed to know way too much about us – I only said hello to someone in the shower block and she said “Oh yes, you’re in the Hymer aren’t you, arrived yesterday?  Now don’t tell me, let me guess… pitch 82?” 

We didn’t stay anywhere more than one night – we’d started to feel like prey - but if you’re of a certain age and you like English, bingo and fish & chips, this would be heaven.  It still strikes me as weird that we Brits retire to other countries en masse regardless of whether or not we speak the local language – maybe it’s something to do with once having had an empire - but there’s no getting away from the fact that there is a wonderful sense of community here;  a home from home down in southern Spain.   And of course, the one thing you can’t reproduce in England is the sunshine.

Talking of sunshine, we’ve been incredibly lucky.  Don’t want to sound too smug or anything but we were sunbathing on a beach near Cartagena only ten days before Christmas, and guess what?  It was so hot we even had to take our cozzies off! 

Well actually that’s not quite true…. We did have to take our cozzies off, but only because the naturist campsite was 12 euros a night including electricity and heated indoor pool, and the place just down the road was charging 24 just for the pitch. We mulled it over for all of ten minutes seconds and thought sod it, we’ll do it. And once we got over the bizarreness of the whole thing, it was really quite relaxing:   you go to the pool wearing your towel, you take your towel off and swim, then you dry off and go back to your van wearing the towel. There’s no changing in and out of clothes, and no wet swimming costumes either – it’s got a lot going for it, I think. And what a very beautiful place too:

I also realised that a huge plus for me was what nude swimming did for my chest!  I felt very buoyant indeed, let me tell you - almost like I was 25 again. Temporary I know, but immensely cheering nonetheless, and I thoroughly recommend it to all my female friends. Useful note to partners of female friends, though: expressing surprise at said buoyancy may not be well-received - just ask Mike.

Happy New Year to you all if I forgot to say that last time - one day does seem to merge into the next a bit here...   Still, it'll all be over soon enough, and then real life and jobs will have to be thought about.  For now though we're happily burying our heads in the gorgeously warm sand, so lots of love from Senor and Senora Ostrich. xxxx