Ending Up Anywhere

We decided to break up our journey back from Spain with an overnight stop at a campsite so we could connect up to electricity and have a hot shower in the morning. Consulting the ACSI website I found Camping la Pinéde en Provence near Mondragon, just north of Avignon. We didn't book it, but turned up at 3.30pm on Thursday 2 January. Reception was manned by a gentleman and Tony practised the French he's been studiously learning by asking for a camping pitch for one night for a small camping car. The man replied with a flood of French, the gist of which we came to understand by his waving of arms at the office printer. We were welcome to stay but wouldn't be getting a printed receipt. The price was €18.60. I'm unsure how the price was €18.60 when that's not one of the ACSI prices; maybe they have added on tourist tax. Anyhow, that represented good value for great facilities and unlimited electricity. We picked a pitch on a terrace leaving once space between

On our first full day at Camping Didota on the east coast of Spain we decided to cycle to Peñíscola. Google Maps said it would be a ride of two hours and twenty minutes. We forgot that Google's cycling times are based upon people faster than us and it turned out to be a six-hour-plus round trip. It was a pleasant ride on quiet rural roads through farmland and orange groves and later on stony paths through a nature reserve. We hadn't used our bikes since our last holiday and so we did find it hard going, particularly on the uphill sections. The additional time we'd taken just getting to Peñíscola didn't leave us long to explore, particularly not if we wanted to be back at camp before dark. We locked our bikes between the new town and the old. Walking towards the13th-century castle we were pleased to find a medieval market selling crafts and hot food. We bought a slice of pizza each, heated while we waited in a wood fired oven. We spent an hour exploring the cobb

As we turned off the motorway towards the coast, the sat nav indicated seven minutes to our campsite, the first chosen from our new ACSI book. Ugly hotel blocks came into view and I hoped our seven minutes left of driving would take us past them and back into countryside. Instead we just creeped closer and closer to them until, at the last roundabout, we turned off towards what was possibly the most run down of them all. Tony pulled up in front of the perimeter wall of the campsite, Camping and Bungalows Didota. It did not look promising at all. Used to the spacious and nature-adjacent campsites of France, rows of tightly-packed caravans and motorhomes inside an enclosed wall was unappealing. However, we'd been on the road for about 22 hours and I didn't want to be the one to say I didn't want to stay. I was half hoping Tony was going to announce that he didn't like the look of it but he didn't. We were looking at a plan of the site on a noticeboard when th