Thursday 21 February 2013

Well, we got unstuck OK and the day is warm and sunny again so after breakfast, service the van and on our way.

Target today La Manga, just east of Cartagena. Used the autovia for a while before turning off at Vera to find a supermarket for, you guessed it, more supplies. From then on we took the minor roads, really enjoying the scenery. A couple of roads were marked as special tourist routes and were into the mountains - it would have been much quicker to use the toll motorway, but we don't do rush and we don't do tolls. Photos really cannot do credit to the real thing, but here's a couple of tries.

Aguilas

A mountain road somewhere today

More scenic roundabouts

Cartagena from a distance

Cartagena was another fine clean, tidy and bustling city. We drove through the centre looking to refill our gas bottles, such facilities being rare in Spain, though plentiful elsewhere in Europe. The obliging attendant told us he expected Spain to start catching up in the next 12 months.

Our destination, La Manga del Mar Menor, was about half an hour away and situated on the southern end of the Mar Menor, or Little Sea, a sea lagoon separated from the Mediterranean by a narrow spit of land. It has been quite comprehensively developed as a tourist area and La Manga Caravanning is HUGE. As well as around 100 holiday chalets and some "permanent" units, there are around 950 touring pitches, each a nice size, surrounded by hedges for privacy and fully serviced, with all the facilities we could possibly need. We don't normally go in for this type of site but it is an ACSI, (a discount scheme operated all around Europe) and is only 14 euros which is cheap for Spain.

Sunset

So we booked in for 3 nights and after settling in, went for a walk around the complex. (The bar/restaurant is offering English fish and chips tomorrow!) before returning to the van just as it got dark.