ROAD TRIP!!

Driving in Europe is mad! We got up early and headed to the airport to pick up our rental car - VW Golf 1.6L Diesel. It boosts man, way more than i thought a 1.6L diesel would. It took a while to get used to driving on the right and changing gears with the right. Yea man, not wasting time on getting an auto, if you're gonna do it, do it right! haha - nah, we had no choice in the matter. I took the first leg of driving, a short-ish drive to Tarragona (where we were gonna stop for lunch). Our final destination for the day was gonna be Valencia, which was about 4 or so hours down the coast.

After getting stung by road tolls on the way to Tarragona, we decided to avoid toll roads for the rest of the trip. Also meant we'd get to take more scenic roads. After we got off the damn roundabout our tomtom GPS had us keep turning back onto for about 20 minutes, we were off on our way to Valencia. We decided to name our tomtom "Kate" after the name of the voice we chose. Kate was pretty good at giving us directions on the open roads, but man, she struggles when she's in a town/city. We got about halfway down the coast to Valencia, when we decided to make a random stop off at a beach. I think the beach was Torrenosta. Awesome beach, but it was dead there, no one was round at all. It was a little creepy how dead it was. Asty had a quick dip, but Tess and I decided to perch on the beach. After a quick snack stop, we jumped back in the car and hit the road to Valencia. Somehow, i'd managed to get Kate trapped in the centre console, but some quick thinking by Tess got her out.

Valencia is a sweet place, but damn their roads are narrow. Kate battled to direct us to the hostel, so we parked up and legged it the last bit. We stayed at Home Hostels and managed to lock in a 6 bed dorm for the 3 of us. Apparantly Valencia is the home of paella, so we were frothing to get amongst some decent paella. It is also the home of Valencia oranges, but we weren't so amped about that... It was pretty convenient that that night was the hostels 5 euro paella and 1 euro sangria night. The whole paella and sangria was a bit of a let down tho - not the best. We decided to drown our sorrows, with more sangria. The organiser of a bar crawl came round the hostel tryna recruit people for the bar crawl that night. We had nothing else on, so decided to get amongst. 10 euro and free drinks at each pub. Once again, we got written. We didn't even make it to the night club... The same gig ran a free walking tour, so the next morning we dragged ourselves outta bed at 12 to join in on that.

The walking tour leader was a classic scottish dude, Paul, who was out til 6am with the bar crawl from the night before. Half the walking tour had been on the bar crawl, so we were all feeling pretty rough. Paul still managed to do a fairly decent job tho. The crawl ended round 2pm, and by that stage we were starving. We found a decent feed near by the hostel and hit up some grub.  Valencia has some sweet street art painted on walls throughout the town as well. We saw some on the walking tour, but i reckon there's more gems if you spent time looking.

After a mid-afternoon siesta, we decided that we'd better not waste the whole day in bed like the other day, so we jumped in the car and headed down to the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències (City of Arts and Science). The buildings there are a buzzy design, pretty cool and worth a look if you have time. We didn't pay to go in and see anything, and missed the aquarium altogether, but by that stage we were pretty keen to check out the beach in Valencia.

By the time we hit the beach it was round 6pm at night. Before you call us idiots, it doesn't get dark til round 9 or 10pm and it's still pretty warm. The water was a little be cool to swim so we just lay on the beach... well, we slept for just over an hour. Probably a good thing it wasn't real sunny out, otherwise there would have been 3 bright red lobsters in the car the next day! When we finally woke up, we navigated our way back the hostel, parked up and went looking for a decent paella. We found a joint that did a pretty sweet paella not far from the hostel. It came out in a big dish that the three of us could just serve ourselves out of. I'm not gonna lie, it was pretty epic. After dins, we headed back to the hostel and hit the hay.

We decided that we'd break up our drive down to Granada by stopping off at a random little beach town called Torrevieja, which translates to "Old Town". We left Valencia pretty early (around 9am) to avoid having to pay anymore for parking. After a couple days away from the wheel, I decided to drive the first part of the way. It wasn't gonna be a big drive day, but on the way we managed to past what would normally be classed as ladies of the night, but they were working in the middle of the day... random, but that must fly over these ways.... We stopped at some random beach in a town just outside of Benidorm, where we checked out if the beach was decent or not. It wasn't that great, but Tessa did manage to finally skip a stone in the water there! We decided to head straight to Benidorm for lunch and a possible dip. Benidorm was fairly build up, and felt like a retirement town. The beach there was good, but packed full of oldies. We had an epic lunch and decided to try our luck at a beach in Alicante. One of the great things about Spain is the siestas. This mean that between the hours of 2 and 4pm, there's free parking as the meter-maids are on siesta. This worked out perfect for our stop in Alicante, one hour free parking! The beach was pretty sweet and the water was good, so we perched there for an hour, had a couple swims and got our tan on for a bit. At 4pm, Alex jumped in the drivers seat and we boosted the rest of the way to Torrevieja.

Torrevieja didn't turn out to be the quiet little beach-side town we thought it was gonna be. It too is fairly built up. The beach front/port area is fairly nice though. We checked into our hotel and Tess loaded up some walking tour notes, and we headed down to the beach front to check it all out. We had a bottle of Don Simon sangria leftover from Valencia, so we brought this along for the tour. The beach front has this massive 1.5km long spit/boardwalk, so we decided to walk to the end of that and watch the sun set. Half way along, we stopped for a drinks break and downed the bottle of sangria. There were a bunch of dudes rock fishing at the end of the spit, we counted 28 rods in the water and after about half an hour, they got nothing! not even a bite... The sun set was pretty sweet, and after we pretty much headed back into town, grabbed a feed and headed back to the hotel to chill.

Tomorrow, we we've got an epic drive to Granada. Should be another sweet journey. Still have yet to give our car a name, so will keep you posted on that. Pretty late now, so i think it's time to sleep. catch u soon.