The start of my action packed Spring/Summer!
Valencia. Flew out to Valencia with Rob on a 7:30am flight from Stansted. We drove there, so was picked up by Rob at 4am!.
Getting there was a bit of a nightmare as we missed the turnoff to Stansted then hit roadworks. It was ages before we could turnoff, then we had roadworks on the way back! Thankfully managed to get to the flight on time though (not much time to spare!).
Valencia was pretty cool. We took a bus into town from the airport, then bumbled around in the underground (quite a nice new system) and managed to get to our hotel (it was a fairly new Ibis hotel - good rates and nice rooms). The remainder of the day we went spent going to an aquarium and looking around at the new architecture they have in the now dry riverbed. (Nice and hot weather btw). We then headed into the medieval part of town until we found a restaurant that had no English on the menu. Really nice meal (main was paela with rabbit and lamb).
The next day we did a bit of a tour of the ancient city (with our guidebooks) and then took a bus towards the waterfront in order to see the famous beach. However, we came across the America’s Cup village, so spent a bit of time wandering there. In the end we went on a catamaran “sailing experience” which took us out into the harbour for a bit of a sail. We passed Team New Zealand coming in on the way back from training! After that we wandered up the beach for a while before taking a tram back into town. That evening we went to a modern Tapas/wine bar restaurant. The meal was very good, and we had a whole range of tasty dishes brought out - the best was grilled parmesan with raspberry sauce.
The next day we got our hire car and headed off North. Visited a Roman Fort, an ancient hilltop village with a castle, and saw a medieval hilltop town, Morella, that was surrounded by a wall at the base. We watched the sunset underneath an ancient acqueduct that used to take water into the town. Unfortunately we couldn’t find any accomodation, so we had to drive on. In fact, we found no accomodation in any of the towns along the coast, until in the end we drove all the way back to Valencia and stayed at a hotel near the airport (another Ibis)!
On the 16th, we then headed south to Alicante where we had a hotel booked. We spent the remainder of the day looking around Alicante. Alicante is a dump. Its quite near Ibiza, but there’s not much to see in the town. We ate at our hotel(!).
The next day we headed out into the countryside which was quite pretty. We drove to a few places mentioned on the guidebook. Btw, we were using GPS, which meant that it was quite easy to navigate. I was sharing the driving with Rob which was quite fun (it was the first time I have driven on the right hand side of the road, and the first time I’ve used a manual car - having been taught on a column-shift manual van). There are heaps of Eu-sponsored motorways all over the countryside, so we often told the GPS to avoid the highways - this meant we took very scenic routes to places. We ended up having a special Easter Monday lunch at a restaurant in the wop wops which only had locals. We had to use the guidebook to work out what the food we were ordering was. Everyone seemed to be planning to spend the entire afternoon in the restaruant, so the whole affair took over 2 hours! (food was grilled lamb in the end). Nice to experience a bit of “local life” which not many people would see though.
The next day we headed back to Valencia stopping a few times en-route. Had lunch at a lovely seaside town. We got back to London quite late.