After our El Palomar stroll, and with the weather now settled for the foreseeable future, we took the opportunity to head back down to the coast. We like to keep our LPG tanks topped-up and Spain isn’t quite as good as France on the LPG-availability front so, having sourced a Repsol station in Alcoi which was listed as an Autogas supplier, we tootled on there to top our tanks off before heading South. A sizeable town, with a long main street with numerous shopping opportunities, including, surprisingly, a Decathlon(!), we merely topped-off our gas tanks and headed back out rather than visit Lidl etc as is our usual wont – I think we were still suffering from PTSD after the stormy night in The Wetlands!

Our next sleep spot was to be Gandia – a small resort, and working port, renowned for its sandy beaches which the local council pride themselves on cleaning on a daily basis. CoPilot was instructed to take us to one of these beaches where, we were reliably informed, one could park up unhindered ( and free) overnight. We arrived to find a huge German Concorde parked up there so, comforted by this ( always safety in numbers), we dropped anchor, had a late lunch, then headed over the dunes to the “daily cleaned ” beach. Errrrr, God love them – it’ll need a JCB and a convoy of dumper trucks to shift this lot!

The recent torrential downpours had filled the previously dried up river bed and, in it’s haste to get out to sea, had torn up it’s own banks and thrown them into The Med. The Med, in turn, seemed to have a “I don’t want all that stuff” mentality and had promptly returned the debris – large quantities of bamboo canes, tree stumps , water canisters which we’d seen in the orange and olive groves for irrigation-  to Gandia’s fine sandy beach!