The road to Zaragoza!

Me again!

Well to answer a few questions - well I haven't had a wine yet, so can't tell you yet what the wine here tastes like, but am gonna have to find a bottle sooner rather than later as I am going to have to find some sort of coping mechanism if I'm going to last another 20 days in this campervan! Have only had 2 coffees since I left Chch too! My poor blood stream!

But yes, the campervan presents us with challenges, especially when the kids find a swimming pool, even when it was cold and wet outside, and they still want to swim, and we were staying near the beach, and we had wet togs piling up, on top of a bag of washing to be done, no dry towels left, everytime someone stepped outside, more sand came back inside with them, this is on top of the lack of space, and the inability to cook a decent meal in here. The kitchen contains a sink and 3 gas hobs! (As well as a handful of basic dishes), so all the meals we are cooking, have to be boiled or fried! Lets just say that the food budget is going out the window, and cafes and takeaways are great options! We don't even have a toaster in here to make breakfast! Speaking of breakfast, mum can you please post some marmite to Jolanda. So anyway, this morning this living situation on top of the kids getting on eachothers nerves, got the better of me for a while.

However, back to this exciting trip, yesterday we drove from somewhere north of Tours down to the Bordeaux region which was just stunning. I really enjoyed driving past these beautiful French villages. They are so full of character, and look so pretty. Last night we stayed about 60 km out of Bordeaux at a campground by the Dune du Pyla, which is a HUGE sand dune, right on the beach. The campground itself was amazing, with so many facilities there, and really targeted towards entertaining children! We climbed the sand dune last night, which was good exercise, and the kids went crazy running and jumping and making "sand slides" all over it. But one of the highlights of this campground (oddly), were the squirrels! Yes, we had squirrels everywhere and they were so cute. No very friendly though, but we enjoyed watching them jump between trees and scurry around everywhere.
The staff there were great too, and told us there was no hurry to check out, we could stay as long as we liked, but we had a long drive today to get to Zaragoza, so we left at about lunchtime. As soon as we got into Spain we noticed an immediate change in the landscape - quite hilly.

The other thing we noticed driving through Spain was the number of wind farms. There are thousands of windmills all through the country side, and as we drove further inland, we also noticed hundreds of solar panels everyhwere. Obviously these are very popular options here for power generation. We noticed a few wind farms in Germany and France too, but certainly not as many as here in Spain. Here in Zaragoza, which is a city of about 600,000 people, and beautifully warm and sunny, is a really weird place. Its a very old city, but spots of very modern facilities. And its in the middle of a very bare landscape, almost like a city in the middle of a desert. Looking towards the outskirts of the city, its dry and bare and seems an odd place to have such a big place.

Some other observations we have all made since arriving in Europe, are the number of people who smoke - we can't get away from it, and the number of people who bike. A very popular transport option in such a populated area, however the cyclists are not required to wear helmets. Apparently this s not required for fear that it will put people off cycling.

So anyway, tomorrow morning we are planning to take a quick look at a few things in the city area of Zaragoza, and then head to Valencia where we have 4 nights. We are all really looking forward to getting there.

We will post more photos later - just got to download them and resize them etc!