Friday October 5, Utiel

It was so good to see water again, this hydro lake was near a
national park.

After a stay put day yesterday, needed to clock some miles today and have a day on the road. Destination in a few day’s time is “somewhere” in North East Spain where we are going to rendezvous with Conny and Hitten, our very good friends from Germany whom we first met in Norway in 2016.

Today’s route took us along the N322 to Albacete then up the N320 to pick up on the A3 and eastwards to Utiel. Once again, we continued driving through olive forests as far as the eye could see, we really never imagined they would cover such a vast area. Would love to see them being harvested, hard to imagine the quantities being picked. Gradually the contour changed and we were in more fertile areas with lots of cropping especially large areas of potatoes near Albacete.

Needed to do a good grocery shop and this afternoon found a Mercadona store not far from the highway on the outskirts of Albacete, gave Jilly the location and let her take over, but really don’t know what she is up to. She had us “going off road” across the motorway to get to the other side. Just crazy when not much further along was the road bridge. Jiggled our way around the streets and back on track and I took over, it was actually a piece of cake and can’t work out why she made it so difficult. Have found the best time to get supermarket carparks are in the afternoon …. when everyone is home having lunch. It was a breeze, had a good shop then back on the road again.

We were in quite different country with lots of cropping and a really big grape growing area. Need to sample some local wines to check them out. The grape harvest is in full swing and passed numerous tractors towing trailer loads of grapes, and there were pickers in the fields as well as machine harvesting. What is interesting that you hardly ever see farm houses, in the middle of the fields. Presume the owners/workers live in the villages and drive out to the land to work each day.

It was 6 o’clock before we finally arrived, once again Jilly took us on a crazy path to get to this camping area, at one stage the road was closed with netting requiring us to turn around, and ended up going the wrong way down a dead-end street! Maybe she is having a midlife crisis, just hard to trust her at the moment. Not much in the way of photos today, just a few drive by shots.

A bit of window reflection, but this building was quite "unique"