Getting ready for a three months adventure holiday is always the worst part of the preparation, making sure we’ve not forgotten anything filling the van with everything but the kitchen sink. We also need to prepare for covid restrictions to get into France and Spain. To get into France we need to have had two covid injections which we have on our NHS App, a declaration of intent downloaded off the French government website and a private LF Test within 24 hours of sailing. So we booked an LF Test at Boots the chemist in Ashford in Kent on the way down to Dover. The results were negative thank goodness. We pulled into Dover did all our checks all ok, and managed to get on an earlier sailing. We sailed with P&O not much traffic on the boat lots of trucks a few cars and one motorhome that was us. The boat was only half full. One and a half hours to cross the channel to Calais, we drove off the ferry and parked up for the night in France at an aire in a village called Wissant. The next morning up bright and early we have a long journey in front of us 1450 miles to get to the sunshine in southern Spain the costa del sol. When we come to Spain in the summer we take it easy, maybe take about 2 or 3 weeks but in winter we take a dash to the sun. Our journey will take us 3 and a half days, off we went heading south through France passing Lille, Amiens, around Paris, Orleans down to Clermont- Ferrand. Sticking to the motorways over some beautiful mountains where the weather was freezing 3° below. Following the A75 down to Beziers by the Mediterranean Sea we passed Perpignan then over the Spanish border. No checks straight over. We are now following the A7 which takes us all the way down to the costa del sol along the Mediterranean passing Barcelona, Tarragona, Valencia, Benidorm, Murcia, Almeria to our destination Rincon de la Victoria to our campsite M&H El Rincon we’re staying here 30 days a small site only 38 vans it’s run by an English lady and her Spanish husband with all facilities.

We have stayed here before it’s a beautiful site and a very reasonable price right near the Mediterranean sea. Well, that was a long drive we were tired out we stayed in bed till late the next morning, when we got up and went outside it was 17° and the sun was shining not bad for January 🌞. Rincon de la Victoria is in the province of Malaga in the region of Andalusia southern Spain. Rincon’s population is 46,093 about 10 miles from Malaga with beautiful beaches stretching for miles. As you can imagine it’s a popular seaside resort mostly with the Spanish people lots of them have second homes here. Plenty of history and things to do around here but we’re going to take it easy of the first week. January is the offseason the weather is warm during the day between 15° and 19°, on a night the temperature drops to 6° / 10°. We’ve settled in ok on our Campsite it’s full up with north Europeans escaping the cold north winter as we are. A few of us meet up in the bar on a night we call it the 5 o’clock club, it’s nice to have chat with all different nationalities.

We’ve not taken a lot of photos yet sorry, we’ve been relaxing but we will get into the swing of blogging for the next time.. We’ll be putting a blog up every Saturday

That’s all for now see you on the next blog .derekandpat.com x stay warm 😎