In winter there were very few campsites open in France. We occasionally needed to use a camp site to fill our water tank or to do the laundry. So we didn’t linger in France but travelled on at a steady 45 mph – a good pace for comfort as well as fuel economy (12-14 mpg) and it wasn’t many days before we reached Spain.
The Road To Salamanca
Once in Spain we found travelling easier. We could stay overnight in large out-of-town hotel car parks. Sometimes we had an evening meal in the hotel restaurant, but it wasn’t obligatory and, if we had already eaten at midday, we would just have a drink in the hotel bar.
In Spain many of the camp sites were open all year (warmer climate than France) and we stopped at a camp site near Mérida. The truck had the luxury of a washing machine on board and I managed to do a load of laundry and pegged it out on a sunny evening ready for the following day which was forecast to be dry and sunny.
Imagine my horror when we were woken in the night by heavy rain beating noisily on the truck roof with attendant thunder and lightening. In the morning my laundry was a sad sight, muddy and dripping limply in the morning sun. Fortunately I was able to put it through the machine’s rinse / spin cycle and before long it was back hanging merrily in the sunshine.
Several hours later we went off to lunch but half way through the meal a big, black cloud appeared from nowhere accompanied by a rumble of thunder – then came the rain. I ran like a gazelle (yes!) the 300 metres through the raindrops and rescued the now dry laundry before returning to finish my lunch. What is that about the “Rain in Spain”?
