Friday, December 08, 2006
Sunday 19th November - Valencia
Sunday we left Villanova park and headed for Moncofa, near Valencia.
Jon has become rather paranoid about the safety of our belongings and car and caravan and we never leave the caravan unattended when we stop at a service station and we keep a constant vigilance i.e. we take it in turns to go to the toilet, the person left in the car must keep a lookout with the mirrors and lock the door. Jon has also programmed the key fobs so that the spare button is used as an alarm so if there is trouble we can press the button and the alarm on the car goes off. When we have a picnic we make sure we can see the whole car and caravan and one of us is always watching it.
Whilst staying in Villanova Park Jon learnt that the Dutch man parked close by had fallen foul to some Spanish bandits. At a service station on the way to the park his tires had been slashed with a knife and two men had turned up with a flat bed lorry offering to tow his caravan away, whilst the couple were refusing the offer their bags and wallets had been stolen out of their open car door. Perhaps Jon was justified about his paranoia, I no longer thought it a joking matter!
Locating the campsite was not as easy as one would have liked, it is easy to get lost in these small Spanish towns with sporadic signage and lots of one way systems and tiny streets. At one point we did end up in a dead end street with the caravan in tow, a predicament we were trying to avoid! However, Jon expertly turned the outfit around and we set off again. We arrived at the campsite to promptly knock the caravan into a metal post, we completely bent the post in two and knocked off one of the high side lights from the caravan, dent number 2, the site owner was very kind and found all the bits from the light and returned it to us, they did not charge us for the damage.
The following morning Jon flooded the caravan by leaving a tap on mid way through doing the washing up when he decided to start chatting to the people next door. The bed had a puddle of water in it, the floor was awash and the water was running out the front of the caravan. We then had to proceed to empty out the contents of the front of the caravan and try and soak up all the water. The other campers were fantastic and rallied round, some brought sponges and buckets, other brought heaters to help dry out the caravan and others recounted tales of other flooding incidents to make us feel better.
The next day we visited the local caves “Coves de Sant Josep” this was fortunately 15 – 20 minutes drive away, or 30 – 40 when you don’t know the way and rely on a satellite navigation system that does not have up to date information regarding the road numbers and which does not cover most local roads in the smaller towns!
The guides did not speak English but this did not stop our enjoyment and our guide was able to get many points across. We travelled by boat to start with in some tunnels that had us crouched over almost double in some places. We then followed a path as just a family to meet the guide at the end and to return by boat. We were able to understand the guide enough to notice the rocks that looked like a dog, a jellyfish and a dragon. We later explored the small free museum dedicated to the Roman and Iberian finds and later went on to look at the local Roman aqueduct.
In the afternoon we went to a local village to see the fishing boats come in, we watched them sort and unload the fish and the boys found it all fascinating. Certainly a good bit of home education! The boys had already enjoyed a fresh fish from these boats the previous night, kindly supplied by our neighbours.
