Road-Trip Day 10

After a long drive along the southern coast of Spain from Almería, we reached Marbella in order to try to meet up with the network guy from work who spends his holidays in the area. Unfortunately, or fortunately as the case may be, my phone wasn't getting good coverage and I was unable to contact him for directions to his place.

Marbella, and indeed from what we saw Málaga as a whole, it essentially one giant British tourist resort. The place essentially consists of what I call copy-paste homes which are your identical display homes cloned hundreds of times on a single hill overlooking the water. Each of these is then sold with large signs in English, normally with some cheesy looking slime ball's photo next to it.

The motorways in the area are surrounded with such billboards, almost like a scene from Brazil, and filled with cars bearing British plates. It's terrifying — this is not spain!

We decided to escape this bizarre den of iniquity as fast as possible, paying whatever tolls necessary and start heading north through the centre of Spain, and wound up stopping off at the rural town of Valdepeñas.

As we arrived, we were immediately welcomed, and told that we were lucky because we'd just caught the last night of their summer fair, where we naturally went on a few rides and watched the fireworks.

We spent most of the afternoon and the evening exploring the town, mostly searching for food. We eventually wound up at a bar with a small restaurant out the back, and were greeted by a gentleman who insisted on practising his English with us. There was a briefly awkward exchange as he read through the menu for us, translating as he went, and finally reached Animelles. After a small volley of apologies, the word gonad came out, and we quickly skipped past it.

Since the area's speciality is beef and wine, we obviously went for the local steak and a bottle of local red wine, which was not only amazingly dirt cheap but the best I've had outside of Australia.

Valdepeñas is a slightly cute little Spanish town, well worth a visit, especially because of its mixed architecture and history. It's a shame we didn't spend more time there, but the clock was ticking for me to get back to work…