Saturday, October 13, 2007

Malaga - Denia 29th September 2007

This morning I only woke up just after 8am. Didn’t have a very good night last night. We managed to pack most of our things up last night and just had to put the last few things into the cases before we went down and had breakfast in the hotel.

I think it must be more than hayfever as my balance isn’t quite right and in the car today my teeth and my ears have been really sore. Kaitlin very kindly offered to sit in the front of the car and let me have the back seat so that I could sleep if I wanted to. She and Al did a great job of navigating us to our accommodation for the next week although Gloria is really out of date with the maps she has loaded. Quite often we were driving in the middle of nowhere with “Go to the nearest road” at the bottom of her screen.

The scenery was very different (what I saw of it) - it was very mountainous in area and at times it was exactly the same as driving along Chapman’s Peak (a drive in SA from Siminostown to Cape Town) only much longer. It was amazing to see how the houses have been built into the sides of the mountains. Just how they got the building materials up is anyone’s guess and I am glad that I don’t have to drive anywhere close to those places.

While we thought we were staying in Alicante, that isn’t exactly true. When we put the address into Gloria - she found it no problem. But as we drove and were getting closer to Alicante, she was telling us we still had 120kms to go. I was awake at this stage and Kaitlin asked me to check it so I did and it looked like it had been entered correctly. Then I looked at the Hertz map - we are actually staying in Denia which is about 100kms north of Alicante even though the address on the RCI sheet says, Les Marines, Denai, Alicante. Then I thought it might be the state but the state in Valencia so really not sure what is going on.

But, we finally made it here, unpacked the car and were off again to find an information centre. They gave us the local tourist map as well as a map of walking trails in the national park at the foot of the mountains and 7 x day trips in and around the area. Not sure that we will do all of them as I would really like some time to just sit and relax and not worry about having to set the alarm to get up by a certain time each morning. The lady at the resort said that they had had miserable weather but that it had cleared up today and they were expecting it to be nice until about Wednesday.

We drove through an area which looked like it had been flooded very recently as you could see all the mud on the streets and collected against the road barriers as well as people cleaning out shops and trying to fix up the damage. I did see something on the news when we were in Madrid but couldn’t follow what they were saying although Al said he thought it looked more recent than that.

We took a drive around Denia this evening and stopped and did some shopping for breakfasts this week. After that we had some dinner along the way - Al and I shared a paella (not quite a nice as the one I had in Toledo - and too oily for my liking or to warrant a second visit) and Kaitlin had spaghetti with napolitana sauce. Then we came home as my head isn’t feeling very good at all and I thought I would catch up on the diary from yesterday and today before going for a bath and an early night.

The unit looks very nice - there is a bedroom and bathroom upstairs and a kitchen, laundry, toilet, diningroom and loungeroom / 2nd bedroom downstairs. The stairs are little wee round the corner stairs which I would hate to have to navigate every day on an on-going basis and I certainly wouldn’t like to have to try to get any furniture up and down them !!!! The good thing is there is a washing machine so we won’t have to pay for that to be done - I have a load on now and will hang that out before going to bath. The resort seems to have quite a few different swimming pools - we have two balconies from our unit. While we cannot see the sea, we only have to go to the end of the resort and through a gate and we are there (not that that has any appeal to us but if we wanted to we could !!!) I think we could have a quiet few days here with maybe some relaxing time in the morning and then some sight-seeing time in the afternoons. With us being this much further north than where we expected to be, our drive to Castellon will be a lot shorter - plus it is closer to Valencia than we thought and so will have a couple of day trips there when we are at the next timeshare.

http://picasaweb.google.com/kal20m/MalagaToDenia29Sep07

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