Well that’s SOK’s Christmas Present Sorted…. A New Fuel Injector

Wednesday 21 to Saturday 31 December 2022

At the end of our last post, we were at Tarifa and planning to move on the next day, Wednesday, after two nights there.

We drove a few kilometres west from Tarifa on Wednesday morning to Punta Paloma, a nice beach where we’d stayed overnight before, thinking that we might stay there on Wednesday night.

Last time we were there, the car park was full of campers that had obviously been there a while (from the amount of stuff scattered under and around them); not so this time. We were told that the police had been round the night before; maybe they’re being more strict about parking these days?

Technically, you can be fined a lot of money for staying overnight at the beach, although all that seems to happen normally is that people get moved on late at night.

We had a nice day mooching about on the beach, then decided to return to the official motorhome aire at Tarifa for another night to be on the safe side.

Our destination on Thursday was Baelo Claudia, a Roman town that was inhabited between the 2nd century BC and the 3rd century AD.

Baelo Claudia is in a good strategic position right on the Straits of Gibraltar. This enabled it to become both an important centre for trade with North Africa and a successful fishing town (making the most of the twice-yearly tuna migration through the straits).

This is definitely one of the best sets of Roman ruins we’ve ever been to; it’s like a little model Roman town.

Here’s Mark standing on one of the original Roman roads, the Decumanus Maximus. The surface isn’t completely even nowadays but that’s apparently due to the impact of earthquakes over the centuries. It’s still very impressive, though; the individual stone slabs still fit together pretty much perfectly.

The white building at the back of the photo above is the modern museum, which houses information about the site together with a range of artefacts found during excavations.

This one is our favourite, a 1st century AD lamp handle found in one of the shop buildings near the forum:

The remains of an aqueduct (with a bit of pipe that’s come away next to it):

The amphitheater (difficult to get a good photo of from the area we were allowed into):

Finally, here’s something we haven’t seen before. Down by the port area is a factory area with huge vats for preserving the fish:

Moving on from Baelo Claudia, we continued west to an aire we’d booked for the next five nights at Caños de Meca near Cape Trafalgar. This would take us through the Christmas period.

Overnight: Caños de Meca (5 nights)

The photo showing the vans is of one half of the aire, so it takes maybe 50-60 vans in total. It was a really nice, relaxing place to doss about over Christmas.

The beach is literally a couple of minutes’ walk away; we spent our four full days here wandering up the beach to the lighthouse at Cape Trafalgar, doing a bit of jogging (Christmas Eve and Boxing Day) to offset our Christmas dinners, pottering about sorting bits and pieces in the van etc. All very relaxing.

We now had a decision to make: to continue along the coast west of Cape Trafalgar requires quite a detour inland around the Doñana National Park, which would only be worth doing if we were going to be spending more than a day or two on the other side. We counted up the days (grrrrr…. Brexit….. grrrrr) and decided to turn around and start heading slowly back East, starting with a bit of a “turning loop” inland.

We left Cape Trafalgar on Tuesday, the day after Boxing Day, and drove inland to Arcos de la Frontera. Here, we could wild camp on a car park for the night (not so much of an issue away from the coast).

Overnight: Arcos de la Frontera

We had a look round the historic town centre on Tuesday afternoon. The old Moorish street layout is extremely narrow and winding (the police car coming round a corner in one of the photos below turned out to be very battered and scraped down the sides):

There is a castle, but it’s private property so we didn’t get a look inside:

Not to worry: we found plenty of other interesting buildings to look at:

Wednesday morning took us back east (still inland) to the small town of Algodonales. Here, there is a free motorhome aire on the piece of ground that they use for their annual fair in July.

Overnight: Algodonales

Algodonales turned out to be a really nice little town and a centre for paragliding (which is what most of the young folk in vans on the aire seemed to be there for). We saw lots of them up in the air when we first arrived; they take off from the hill behind the town in the photo below.

The next day, Thursday, our plan was to drive to Ronda, park up at the motorhome aire on the outskirts of town (which would give us 24 hours for €16), then walk into town in the afternoon. We’ve been to Ronda before but figured it was a town worth revisiting.

It wasn’t to be…. on the way to Ronda, SOK suddenly came over all poorly. At first, it just felt like we were driving on a very rough road (when the road didn’t look rough at all) so we stopped and checked the tyres etc. All looked OK so we decided we’d carry on and head for the Ford garage at Ronda to get it checked out.

A bit further down the road, it suddenly got worse. SOK was now vibrating like an ancient washing machine on a spin cycle. There was nothing for it but to pull up and call the cavalry.

Unfortunately, the cavalry was unavailable so we had to make do with the AA……

Getting past the AA call centre(s) in the UK was absolutely hopeless: ages on hold, then you’d finally get through to someone who, after taking all the details, told us they “couldn’t help us” as we were in Spain so would transfer us to another department. More waiting in a queue, then another person who couldn’t help us as we were in Spain. Aarrrggghhh! You’d think that when you rang the number you’d been told to ring “from overseas” that the computer would send the call to the right place, but apparently not….

We eventually got passed to a call centre in Lyon, at which point matters improved dramatically (presumably it’s not actually run by the AA). They took all the information, then we got a call a bit later from someone in Madrid with a couple more questions.

It’s at times like this, when faced with call centres in France and Spain, that you hope What.Three.Words will come up with something easy like Cat, Dog, Help.

Erm, no. Trust us to break down at Triangular, Eclipses, Entwine.

Full marks to the lady in the Madrid call centre for managing to type that in correctly as I spelled it out for her!

Not too long after, a recovery truck arrived. Yes, it’s a bit small for the job:

The driver wasn’t convinced. He took photos of SOK loaded up and sent them off to someone who he then ‘phoned (presumably his boss). The decision seemed to be that it’d be fine….

A very careful job was done of ratcheting all four of SOK’s wheels down, then we had a very slow and sedate drive (with the driver spending as much time checking SOK’s back wheels in his mirrors as he did looking where we were going) down to Ronda. Luckily it was only about 20km.

Needless to say, we arrived shortly after the garage closed for lunch, so we were deposited outside to wait for them to reopen. The message we’d been given was that they’d have a look at it and would fix it straight away if possible. If not, and given the approaching New Year holiday, it might end up being next week.

In SOK chugged at 4pm. The diagnostic machine soon came back with the result: injector number 4.

Initially the garage weren’t sure they’d get it fixed this week, and no, we couldn’t drive it the 5 minutes down the road to the motorhome aire to wait things out there.

Faced with a few nights in a hotel, our pitiful little faces must’ve made them feel sorry for us. The parts man managed to source an injector for the next morning, and they decided that they could put SOK out on the road outside for us to sleep in him overnight.

In SOK went at 8.30am on Friday morning when the garage opened. Everything went fine (which doesn’t always happen; we must stop reading all the horror stories on Facebook) and we were out by 11.30am.

Here’s SOK making his triumphant exit from the workshop, and Mark in the reception area under a big “relax” sign….

We decided that, rather than staying in Ronda, we’d continue on back down to the coast. We were only going to “relax” once SOK had had a good run and we were fully convinced that he was OK again.

Before leaving, Mark revealed his “winnings” for the day. Whilst waiting for SOK, Mark had been out wombling around the Ford garage perimeter fence and come back triumphantly with some pieces of metal.

He doesn’t have a use for them in mind but he is sure that they will “come in” (together with a box wombled from a bin to store them in). I may have to send him to his cousin Ruth for some counselling; maybe she can do something about these random wombling urges?

SOK behaved impeccably all the way to El Hornillo, which is just a few kilometres west of Caletas de Velez, the place with the green parrots that we stayed at on the way east.

The only strange thing is that the remaining range on the dashboard has gone nuts. It started off at 354 miles when we left Ronda and an hour later was reading 470 miles.

All we can think is that he’s lost some history data and, as it’s downhill all the way from Ronda to the coast, was basing his ridiculous range estimate on about 60mpg. It did seem to be correcting itself a bit as we then continued east along the coast: for every mile we drove, the remaining range came down by about ten.

We did have a bit of a delay along the Costa del Sol as we tried, and failed, to stop at three different Carrefour “hypermarkets”. The shops may be big but the parking arrangements didn’t allow us to stop and spend our money (all parking with height barriers? all underground parking?) so we ended up at a LIDL instead.

After all that, it was late afternoon by the time we started looking for a place to stay. We had three on our list (knowing that it might be a problem; you generally want to show up in the morning to grab a spot).

The first place we stopped at was full but we squeezed onto the second. They had one space left but only without electricity (presumably one electric point on the post is broken as everyone around us has electricity). Fine – we took it.

We were lucky. By the time I got back to reception to show my passport and pay, a French van was being turned away as the aire was now full….

Overnight: El Hornillo (2 nights)

This one is another good-sized aire, taking 50 or so vans.

Right outside the back gate of the aire is a black sand beach. It’s not the nicest beach we’ve been to lately (it’s a bit gritty), but then we’ve been spoiled rotten at other places:

This aire seems very popular with long-stay Germans. There was a very enthusiastic game of pétanque going on as we parked, then an evening of chattering. It’s like being in the middle of a German Womens’ Institute meeting.

We’ve been kept awake by many things over the years in SOK – loud bars nearby, kids with car stereos, etc – but never before by the whitterings of a flock of pensioners….

It’s New Year’s Eve tonight. The Germans all seem to be taking things easy for the moment. Are they saving their energy for a big night tonight we wonder? We’ll let you know in our next update.