Saturday 22^nd February 2025

Woke up in a town called Lorca. We accidentally came across the Aire in this town when we continued our drive south last night (having given up any hope of finding the intended Murcia site). Luckily the Aire which we did stumble upon was across the road from a supermarket, enabling us to stock up on our essentials. Electricity still not working. Amazing drive as we headed down towards Los Escullos Camping, Nijar in Almeira.  Misty mountains surrounded us and seemed to go on for mile after mile with just the tallest peaks breaking through the low cloud. Gradually we started to notice the polytunnels (presumably used to grow fruit and vegetables under cover). Interesting, initially, but we were soon overwhelmed by the massive area that was covered in ugly plastic. Worse still was the amount of discarded plastic. It was piled up in the corners of many fields and most high fences had strips of old plastic caught up in the wiring and blowing in the wind. We could have been on our way to a ski resort looking at the ‘snow’ covered expanse in front of us. Fortunately before arriving at our campsite we crossed over into the Nature Reserve of Parque Natural del Cabo de Gata-Nijar. The whole area is full of nature trails which we will set out to explore. We are determined to get up to walking at least 10,000 steps a day (but obviously not when it is raining, or too sunny, or too hot, or too cold, or too windy…….

Best: Finding that our campsite was not surrounded by litter and plastic.

Worst: Realising that we are nowhere near fit enough to be able to fully enjoy this beautiful Nature Reserve.