Day 5 – Valencia to Arboleas

After a very peaceful sleep on a very comfy bed (I can recommend the Holiday Inn Express in Valencia) we trundled on down for a continental breakfast.

The first issue was the lack of child-friendly food. Abigail really wasn’t keen on anything that was on offer, life would be easier on her if she wasn’t so fussy. So she had to make do with bread and jam with orange juice. Tilly, on the other hand, ate everything we put in front of her except the muesli (Spanish muesli is a bit bland). I had some of most of the offering and I especially enjoyed the cheese and ham. Emma had a bit everything as well (except the bland muesli).

So, in the car for 11ish and back to the motorway. The roads were reasonably quiet since it was a Sunday morning.

The thing that always strikes me about Spanish motorways is they are very boring. However, it’s a bad idea to lose concentration because of how the Spaniards tend to drive (more on that elsewhere). We drove for a couple of hours, Tilly slept for a while and Abigail was quiet (although probably bored silly).

We were hoping to make it as far Murcia before having to stop but we needed fuel and as soon as I turned off the car Tilly woke up. We drove on because there is a shopping centre just off the motorway on the north side of Murcia but (thanks to rather poor signposting) we took a wrong turn and ended up going along another motorway until the first junction. We turned around and gave up on the idea of finding the shopping centre, instead opting for the next services.

Now, when I say services I mean it kind of loosely in this instance. The “services” was actually a run-down petrol station and a run-down restaurant on the edge of a small industrial estate about half a mile from the exit off the motorway. It didn’t look very promising but we had little choice but to stop.

We picked a table outside the restaurant and the (rather bolshy) waitress asked us if we wanted to eat, we said yes and she said that eating was indoors because they were busy. We sat down where we were anyway and then she agreed to serve us food since we were here. The service didn’t improve at all but the food was good and not too pricey either.

So, after a large lunch all round we boarded the car for the last 2 hours of the journey. This bit went with predictable lack of incidence, driving towards the sun in the 30 degree heat wasn’t all that much fun though.

Have to admit that I was in the pool as soon as we unloaded the car, it was lovely and warm and very very welcome.