Tuesday morning we awoke bright and somewhat earlier than usual due to the noise from the port where we were parked up and, leaving our Seville not-much-sleepy spot, we headed up the A4 for our date with Antonio, the motorhome “surgeon”.  Antonio greeted us with a handshake and pretty good English, immediately ushered us around to his “operating theatre”, called to his assistant and, thus, Sebo went under the knife……well, in truth, he had his fridge gas burner replaced and his flue given a good cleaning out whilst we looked on nervously, like worried parents! Thankfully, it was all over within forty five minutes and, having thanked Antonio profusely for his exceptionally prompt and pretty reasonably-priced service (€120 for parts, labour & VAT), our beer was now chilling nicely and we were heading back in a southwesterly direction towards Portugal.

Having the fridge/freezer running efficiently on gas means we don’t have to rely on electric hook-ups which should, hopefully, save us a fortune on campsite fees. As long as the sun shines to keep our solar panel topping-up our batteries, we should really only need a mains supply whenever all four(!!!!) of our electric toothbrushes need charging- which we reckon is around every twelve days. For some reason best known to itself, our inverter will quite happily charge my Macbook, Roy’s iPad, our phones, the handheld vacuum and pretty much everything else, but has a strong dislike for the toothbrush chargers! It has now blown two of them and we’re down to our last! Weird but true!!

Our last overnight stop in Spain (for now!) was to be Huelva. Not a town that really has much going for it – a huge port and a highly industrialised town whose “old town” was completely destroyed in an earthquake in 1755 and was never rebuilt. However, it has a free car park at a huge (37m tall) monument to Christopher Columbus, a sandy beach which goes on for miles and a pleasant boardwalk which meanders through the quite recently replanted, carbon munching, wetland bird sanctuary, and it is, handily, just off the motorway, so we parked-up and went for our afternoon stroll along said boardwalk.

Not the quietest of sleepy spots, it has to be said BUT it served it’s purpose for us and after a bit of a disturbed sleep, we broke camp and hit the road for The Algarve.

We haven’t really watched much in the way of TV lately, other than the Spanish News and Weather and it would appear that, apart from the torrential rain we experienced in Valencia before Christmas, we’ve managed to stay ahead of the rain and now snow being experienced by those poor unfortunates in some of The Spanish Costas. Portugal have had awesome weather since before Christmas and our only concern now is that it’s gonna be bunged to the doors with fellow travellers escaping from Spain! Always a popular spot in the winter, we can only imagine that it’s gonna be even busier this year! Time will tell…..