28/05/18 – 30/05/18 – Benicàssim
Apart from the annual music festival held there in July, we didn’t really know much about Benicàssim. As it turned out, it was pretty nice.
Before that however, we had completely ran out of LPG in Alcossebre (Including the back-up tank) so we took a half our detour using the my.LPG.eu app to find the nearest LPG station.
When we brought the van, the previous owners gave us a number of adaptors to use across Europe for filling the tanks, but the one we needed today, we didn’t have. Fortunately, the garage had one that fitted, so €15 late we were refilled and cooking on gas…..literally.
We decided to use a free aire again found on searchforsites.co.uk – this place was just outside the main part of town and about 20 minutes walk from the beach – it also had free facilities. As there were no other Moho’s on site, we weren’t entirely sure that we were at the right place, but we pulled over anyway and got parked up (Obviously growing in confidence). Before long another couple of vans pulled in behind us, so that helped ease that initial nervous feeling and we left the van to go explore.
We had a quick recce along the main high street but Marley was having none of it, and given it wasn’t really the time to go explore the beach, we headed back to the van for dinner….or so we thought.
As we tried to boil the kettle, no gas. The fridge was also starting to feel a little warm….tick, tick, tick (The sound of the gas trying to light to cool the fridge)….nothing…..what was wrong. All I could think of is that the gas had somehow leaked out from refilling earlier that day. Worried about the food in the fridge going off, we set of driving around trying to find another LPG refill garage.
3 stations later, and thanks largely to google maps, we finally found another garage who had Autogas – YES! This time around there was someone operating the pumps, they had the adaptor… WIN. As it turned out, I hadn’t pressed the override button to start the pump earlier that day, and I ended up paying for the previous persons refill and no gas for us…won’t do that again. CRISIS OVER.
Anyway, the next day we headed to Las Villas Beach – a seafront strip that was popular for Valencian socialites to have weekend houses/holiday homes dating back to the 19th Century. Many of the original villas still stand there, avoiding much of Spain’s over-development of their seafront.
It made for a nice walk, taking about an hour by the time we had read all the plaques detailing the histories of the main villas before we reached Playa Del Terreon where we had our first beachside beers since we had left the UK (I cant believe it took us nearly 4 weeks) at a place called La Isla Chiringuito – Even though it was on the beach, they were fine with Marley being there with us – we would definitely recommend coming here for a visit if you ever are in Benicàssim.
2 pints later, and feeling like we needed something to soak up the alcohol we found a beachfront restaurant called La Calma where we both had a hunger for some Paella – Seafood for me, vegetable for Lorraine…the only problem was, each paella had a minimum 2 person order…felling slightly tipsy and very hungry we ordered the 2 person paella each….Fortunately, the restaurant said we could take half of it home with us. YUM.
After lunch we took Marley for a walk on the beach where a local came up to us – we had a funny conversation – us speaking very poor Spanish, him speaking the odd word of English with lots of gesticulating…he found it funny when we said we were English and he pointed to my rapidly reddening skin…ha ha ha…Rojo….he laughed even more when I pulled my vest to one side….ha ha ha….blanco y rojo (white and red) …funnier still (at least to Lorraine) was when he asked our names, he immediately associated me with Lieutenant Dan from Forest Gump! Fun times 🙂
