11th Apr MORELLA - CARRETERA PLATJA LLARGA (TARRAGONA)

We left Morella this morning and headed for another inland aire at Asco; we would have stayed another day in Morella but we hadn’t got much in the way of food and we didn’t find a shop yesterday. The drive was lovely fabulous views that seemed to stretch to the edges of the earth, you could see for miles in every direction; unfortunately there was nowhere to stop to take photos. On the down side, this is the area where they raise animals for food; don’t ask what animals as all that’s visible is huge sheds with feed hoppers along side, piles of manure and then you get the occasional whiff of ‘caged’ animals.

We arrived in Asco at 1.45 p.m. and looked for somewhere to buy food – everywhere was shut (siesta time) and wouldn’t be open until 5.00 p.m. (we still haven’t got to grips with siesta time!). As we were walking through the town there was a loud warning siren, followed by this lady making an announcement (in Spanish) from loudspeakers mounted on lamp posts along the road – there was no one around to react and we had no idea what she said (so we ignored it). We continued walking and found a sign post showing the way to various parts of the town – the scariest one being directions to the nuclear power station!!!!! We had seen these huge cooling towers, alongside the beautiful river, pumping out steam, (just like in The Simpsons) but hadn’t taken much notice – however putting this together with the ‘early warning system’ announcement (probably wasn’t, but we weren’t going to take chances) we decided to leave!!! The town didn’t have a very welcoming atmosphere anyway.

As we were leaving the Asco aire Brett realised that, when we filled up our water tank in Morella, he had left the filler cap to the tank on top of the service point – we had to make a decision, was it worth going back (75 miles) and probably not finding the filler cap or should we drive to the coast (45 miles) .................. bearing in mind we still hadn’t managed to buy any food the coast won, and now we’re looking for a camping accessory shop to buy a new filler cap (Brett is not happy, I’m just glad it wasn’t me!).

We got to the coast before 5.00 p.m., by now we were desperate for food as we had no milk, water, butter, bread or vegetables. We parked in Torredembarra (somewhere we thought we might find a wildcamping spot) and walked through the town – everything was still closed! But Brett did manage to pick up the internet on his Ipod and we got the co-ordinates for a wildcamping spot a couple of miles away (hoorah) and on our way there we found an open supermarket (double hoorah).

So now we’re wildcamping, about 20m from the Mediterranean Sea (yawn!), Ha Ha, another idyllic spot.

We’re only about 65 miles from Barcelona and we’re debating when we should head there – I still think it’s a bit close to the Easter break and will still be very busy, so we’ll probably stay here for a few days. There is a campsite close by so we might do a night there too, to get everything topped up and the internet – I know they’ve got it as I can get it on my laptop, unfortunately I haven’t got login details.