Days 7 – 14 Alcossebre – ¡otra vez!

After the relative disappointment of the beach at L’Ampolla, we headed down the coast to an old time favourite – Camping Tropicana at Alcossebre, happy in the knowledge that there’s plenty of beach to be lazed upon. Tropicana is somewhere we’ve stayed a number of times, as well as free camped on the rocks overlooking the beach, over the years.

 

Wanting not much more than a bit of down time, swimming, reading and maybe a bike ride or two, we checked in, safe in the knowledge that as we had been so many times in the past (last autumn the most recent) we had a fair idea of which bit of the site we would like to choose from the limited range of ACSI discounted parcelas…

 

Except, for reasons we were never able to fathom, the owners had changed the pitch allocations, so where we were in the autumn – a quiet row with a view through to the sea (just) and a gentle breeze – which was empty – was now no longer an ACSI pitch – grrr!

 

And, after realising that most of the ACSI pitches were now clustered mainly, but not exclusively, in the more shaded part of the site with more permanent Spanish caravans (good, we thought, as we like this more authentic experience, even with the noisy weekends!) we hit a dilemma – we wanted to get a ton of washing done, but the pitches were not going to deliver, as they were very shady. Luckily for Mr B, who loves a shady pitch in the heat, Mrs B decided that the laundry could wait until our next stop in a few days’ time…

 

Of course, it being the Spanish Med in ideal weather, our initial four nights turned into six, and our washing pile languished under the bed. Which wasn’t the end of the world, as, is often the case, we spent most of our time in our swimmers so didn’t add much to the laundry heap!

 

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We excel at this type of sun drenched prevarication, lapping up the slow (very) pace of life at the beach, with the delight of the food and drink available to us to cook back at the camper, or to enjoy eating out.

 

Which is how we ended up enjoying one of the most delicious fish BBQs we have ever done, with a whopping 1kg+ Corvina – a type of bass that is popular and much prized in this part of Spain it seems – but not until now, known to us.

 

 

With our not-very-big BBQ we had to have its head lopped off so that it would fit, and, also new to us, we took up the fishmonger’s tip and left the scales on so that the skin would peel off easily – which it did!

 

With a delicate, firm and sweet flavour, this is definitely a fish we will watch out for again.  Along with an amazing value bottle of Fino sherry we picked up for under €3 for starters (we guessed that as it was made in Cordoba, it lacked the cachet of Jerez-produced Finos and was priced accordingly) and a bottle of good old Blanc Pescador white, we had a great evening along with our exuberant, but not-that-noisy-in-the-end Spanish neighbours! And, although we were a bit slow down to the beach, so the photo doesn’t do it justice, we were also lucky to have a Harvest moon to eat by!

 

 

We’ve not used the pay WiFi here before, but as were falling behind with the blog, we thought we’d better take the plunge. So, having read a sign on the check-in desk telling punters what the tariffs were, and that codes could be purchased in the camp-site bar – cash only – Mr B set off to the bar to get 24 hours worth for €5.

 

Except, after being hailed at the bar by a waiter (¡Diga coño! – what else!) it turned out that they didn’t – but they did back at reception…

 

Unperturbed, Mr B made his way back to reception, thinking he had misread the sign on the desk… but he hadn’t, of course; the resto and the camping were run as two separate business units now, and no-one had bothered to take the sign away! Waiting for an apology that never came for sending him on a wild goose-chase, Mr B checked with reception that ¡Diga coño! did indeed mean ‘talk to me c*nt’ (it did), but he did get an unexpected apology in case he wasn’t aware of Spanish cultural norms and their difference to British ones! The word is used differently here and it’s not unusual to hear parents calling their children to them or wives calling their partners, something that used to amuse us when we had the house here; it was a favourite cry of the local bar-resto owner’s wife when talking to her beleaguered husband!

 

Having established that Mr B wasn’t at all offended, the receptionist had to then let him down gently with the news that there would be no new WiFi codes until the next day! Which is a bit of a long-winded way of explaining just how challenging it was to get some internet…

 

Apart from using the bikes to go into town for shopping, we also treated ourselves on what was our last full day in Alcossebre, to a bike ride along the coast and through the ‘parc natural’ to the small resort town of Torrenostra, which we’ve visited before but not eaten there.

 

 

Not this time however, with Mrs B’s uncanny instinct of sniffing out somewhere the locals favour, we fetched up at the beachside and family run ‘Vintage’, overlooking the beach and about ¾ full.

 

It didn’t take long to plump for the €16 menu-del-dia for three courses and a drink (like lots of France, it’s often better in Spain to eat out at lunch with more of an imaginative choice of dishes and better value). Which is how we ended up with, amongst other delights, an amazing seafood salad (normally just tuna, but this had tuna, salmon and bacalau), a delicious pig cheek on the bone, which was so tender, the meat almost fell off the bone and a fillet of sea bass with salsa verde for Mrs B. Finishing off with a couple of cortado coffees (only an extra €1 each) we sat and shot the clichéd breeze whilst our much-larger-than-usual lunch slipped down, and we prepared ourselves for the 45 minute ride back to Evie.

 

 

It’s a lovely bit of coastline here, backed by the ‘parc natural’ with a scattering of abandoned buildings and plenty of interesting fruit trees along the road (including figs growing wild– which we had missed – but luckily still in the shops and they are truly delicious!) as well as lots of pockets of free campers out on the beach line.

 

 

Sitting around the multiple citronella lamps and anti-mosquito coils much later (you can see in these pics how well prepared/paranoid Mr B is with mozzies)

 

 

 

 

 

we were reflecting on what a lovely time we had enjoyed, yet again; how we would choose another better sunlit pitch next time (partly for more sun for washing, but also to get away from the noise of the intermittent resto kitchen extractor fan) when the said fan suddenly started up… it was 1130pm and it was normally (except for weekends of course) very quiet. ‘Let’s hope the kitchen staff haven’t gone home and forgotten about it’ said Mr B…

 

And, you guessed it!

 

So, in spite of our best efforts to pretend it was just like the sound of the nearby lapping waves we normally fell asleep to, we failed, and had to try and block it out with our favourite ‘fall asleep’ chill-out music by Sheffield DJ/producer Michael E. This worked for Mrs B, who was asleep by track 3, but not Mr B, who, by the time the 0800 alarm went off wasn’t really sure whether he’d slept or not…

 

Which, Mrs B commented, went some way to explaining his somewhat erratic driving the next day!

 

Will we be back? Oh yes! But next time we might just go old school, and drive on into the early part of the night and free camp to start, just down the coast from Tropicana – there might be a bit of late night and early morning traffic noise, but there definitely won’t be any all night extractor fan serenading!

 

Some refelections on Brexit and camping as a Brit…

 

One interesting observation we made upon arrival at Tropicana was the absence of la bandera Reino Unido – the Union Jack. It used to fly at the entrance to the gate along with the flags of other EU nations – but no more! Of course it might just be that it was badly damaged and degraded (uniquely) but it certainly hadn’t been replaced. We also observed an interesting ‘altercation/stand-up row’ between a Brit and an EU citizen over what we will call ‘engine etiquette’.

 

Anyone who has travelled in Spain might have observed the practice of running an empty car for a while to get the air-con to drop the inside temperature – but we’d never seen it on a campsite and with a motorhome – for obvious reasons, given the close proximity of neighbours and their outdoor seating/eating arrangements.

 

None of this stopped a fellow Brit from deciding he needed to cool his motorhome down and leave his engine running before departure though… And polite requests from an EU camper to turn it off – declined – soon led to a shouting match which rapidly drew on anti-Brit, post Brexit invective, telling the offender to ‘go home’ along with some other choice phrases and references to other idiots like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage…

 

It didn’t take long to escalate – on both sides – and we were only too aware of how much anti-Brit/Brexit feeling there may be lurking under the polite campsite greetings. Plus, it reminded us of the disbelief we and other EU campers felt back in 2016 when the vote happened and we were in northern Spain. And it helped reinforce the decision we took to swap to Scottish number plates to help distance ourselves in some small way from the 52% that voted to leave – it never ceases to amaze us just how many folk from other countries know, and remember, that Scotland voted to remain. So just as well Mr B had some of his growing up in Scotland!

 

S&J 11.10.23