27/05/18 – 28/05/18 – Alcossebre
About a half hours drive South of Peniscola is the Parc Natural de la Serra d’Irta, part of the Spanish coast line, which has hardly been touched by tourism. Being a nature lover, I really wanted to go and Dan obliged. We found a free overnight stop in Alcossebre (basically a row of parking spaces) next to the sea which was separated by rocks. Being the only ones there, we waited a while, noticed we were getting a few looks from passers by and then thought, sod it lets go anyway.
We went off on our bikes on what we believed to be a 5km ride, and I was pretty excited about the mention of a natural thermal spa at our destination point.
There were no cycle paths that we could see, and once we reached the start of Parc we saw how rocky and dusty the road was. We already knew about this, which was why we hadn’t taken the Moho. I hadn’t quite planned for how uncomfortable it was, given I have a road bike with narrow wheels and had to focus hard not to fall off. Dan struggled with the vibrations to his wrist and knee despite him having a more suitable mountain bike. Poor old Marley must have had a bit of headache, as it went on like this for about 20 minutes.
Once we finally reached the sea, it was beautiful. Marley got to run free, which so far is a rarity in Spain. We chilled for a bit on the beach and took in the scenery before continuing to look for the spa, and came to a sign that said “no cycling”. We decided it was too late to turn back, and thought if approached we would act like dumb lost tourists. Walking with your bikes surely is not the same as cycling anyway!! So the adventure continued, we came to quite a steep drop which we had to take turns carrying our bikes down whilst making sure Marley was ok.
The promise of that natural spa didn’t come, it looked like a huge white tower with graffiti, not as I’d imagined at all, and chose not to stay. We passed by a young hippy couple in the depths of the woods living in a vintage Hymer that looked like it had broken down years ago and remained there. They were living with their dogs amongst the pine trees. I suggested to Dan about us doing this too, but for some reason he declined.
Once we came out of the tree line, there was a lovely cycle ride along a wooden path with lots of large impressive cacti. At the end we came to an area we’d initially stopped at on route to admire the view, and at this point realised that there was a shorter much more comfortable route that we could have taken… typical, but were would the adventure have been in that!
That evening, we chilled in the van eating Dan’s favourite…Spanish tortilla and drinking beer. We keep saying that we must stop treating this like a holiday, as I’m pretty sure we have drank alcohol every day since being away.
The following morning, after a short walk along the promenade of Alcossebre, we moved on. It was quite pretty, but definitely only worth a one night stop. Off we go!.
