Santa Pola

210 miles, 26.1mpg

On leaving Granada we decided to head for a site we'd located via our ACSI book in the town of Santa Pola, just to the south of Alicante. This involved a nice drive on good roads through the Spanish hills, passing many, many farms growing citrus fruits.

Arriving at the campsite was a bit of a surprise as pretty much all the other sites we'd been to so far were mostly empty, but this one was very close to full. The reason for this was that it's very popular with motorhomers from Northern Europe (the Scandinavian countries and Germany mainly) who come down here to over-winter in sunnier climes. I can see why and was quite jealous because it's a lovely site with a nice pool, a bar and great facilities. It's also walking distance into the town of Santa Pola itself, which has nice beaches and decent shops and a market.

This ended up being our longest stop of the trip as we decided to stay for a week - and could easily have made it longer (months longer even!). One bit of admin I finally got around to doing was to head into Alicante and get a new battery for the motorbike as while the bike was new there was clearly something badly wrong with the battery as it wasn't holding a charge meaning I'd had to bump start the bike lots of times.

We spend most of our time pottering around the site, using the pool and the bar and also buying food from the various food vans that visited on different nights (including one that did a very decent Currywurst).

We also took a boat trip out to Tabarca Island, which is a small island just off the coast with some nice beaches and bars etc. The boat has a glass bottom as well so we saw various fish as we entered the harbour on the island.

Being in Spain meant that Fiona fancied Paella for lunch and we found a nice place where we could sit outside and eat.

On one of the days we also took the motorbike out and had a ride around the coast to the North of Santa Pola, including visiting the Skywalk viewing platform at El Faro:

The island you can see in the background of the photo above is Tabarca.