Rest, relaxation and a bit of rain in Spain COMPLETE 11/10 About This Page:

[Hugmonster]

That cake looks lovely!! I doubt I could finish it in one go.

[duck addict]

The cake looks great
The bug bites

[goofysdtr]

Sorry about your bug bites! My son reacts similarly, & I know how uncomfortable he can be.

That cake looks so good right now!

[DawnK]

-those bites.
-that rain.
-that cake!!

[pamcarey]

Oh my, those bites look awful! I'm so glad the cream helped a bit.

[Nimros]

Oh Cheryl - so sorry about your bug bites! And here I was complaining about the ones I got at Disney, which were nothing compared to yours.

That was a lot of rain coming down. Your Nutella crepe and the cupcake looked delicious. Glad you had such a 'merry' evening.

[BritDisFan]

Sorry about your bites , on the plus side that cake looks great!

[chezp]

Sorry for the late update - we've only just got back from London, where we saw Fleetwood Mac last night on the final night of their tour...

Thursday 15 October – part two: the sun finally emerges!

We spent a couple of hours at the villa and at least the rain had stopped by now.



One of the flowers overhanging the villa’s gardens

Then, with the Spanish siesta out of the way, we headed into Moraira to check out car hire places. Unfortunately, it was the same story at every one we tried, no cars were available. One explained that their cars were all located in Alicante, near the airport, which made sense, and that they wouldn’t bring a car up here for the day. It was quite amusing, as Dave and Barb learnt about some car hire places in the town that they never knew existed, so that will hopefully come in useful for some visitors in the future.

By the time we finished visiting the car hire places, the sun was starting to come out and there was some blue sky to be seen, so I suggested that we head back to El Portet, where we’d driven this morning with the views over the marina at Moraira, and it turned out to be a great decision. The sun was lighting up the area beautifully, as you can see in these photos:



We walked a little further along and then Dave suggested that we do a short section of the walk along the seafront that the local government have been putting in, in recent years. Apparently it runs for quite a few miles now, but we were only going to do a couple of hundred yards. It offered more stunning views of the marina with the Penyal d’Ifach and Calpe behind and some lovely views of Moraira’s old town. It’s a really lovely walk, although it was sad to see that every light along it had been vandalised and that there was graffiti everywhere. What a shame. I guess it shows we all suffer the same problems around the world.



We then drove a bit further down the coast and made another stop for some more photos:



On our way back from that, I spotted signs for the tourist information office, so we stopped there, where we collected lots of leaflets on things to do and see in the area, which I figured would always come in handy in the future for anyone visiting here. We also asked about car hire in there and the girl was excellent, calling lots of different places to see if any of them could provide a car for us for tomorrow, but sadly, I could hear from her reaction that the answer was the same at every place she rang – no, there was nothing available. Oh well, I’m a great believer in fate. It just wasn’t meant to be then. :

We headed off to Iceland to get some dinner and this place is amazing. It is literally a home from home, with all the brands you’d see in the UK. It’s also a massive shop, with just row upon row of frozen foods in front of you, which is what Iceland are known for at home, but that’s only half the shop, with the rest taken up with fresh food, goodies for the cupboards, cards, books and magazines. We’d already been told that if ten people request an item, Iceland will stock it, which is pretty impressive customer service. It’s a great place and, as a result, it took us all ages to decide what we wanted. Eventually, Dave and Mark opted for bacon and eggs, Barb went for a fish and chip dinner and I opted for a prawn and salmon carbonara, the first time I’ve ever seen carbonara without ham.

On the way back, Dave and Barb spotted some small plastic chairs that they thought would be perfect for the kids when they come out to the villa. The way it seems to work in Spain is that if you’re throwing away anything half decent that you think could be recycled, you put it next to the rubbish bins, so people can see it and that’s how it was in this case and, to be honest, they weren’t bad either:



We headed back to the villa and cooked up dinner, but there was a bit of a mis-calculation and we all ended up eating at different times, although it didn’t matter. We all enjoyed our own individual meals and also enjoyed a glass of the raisin wine that we’d sampled the day before.

An hour or so later, it was off to bed and the end of another day.

The weather today was rain, with temperatures in the 60s, with a brief spell of sunshine in the late afternoon.
The best thing today was getting the photos of Moraira marina.
The worst thing today was the miserable weather.
Today we tried hiring a car.
And the result was we had no luck anywhere.
The most magical moment today was when the sun finally came out.

Next: “I thought they said wall to wall sunshine”

[Disneybine]

All caught up! I love Mark's "O" shirt, by the way Sorry to hear about all the rain. That's really the last thing you need when you're at the Spanish coast

[clio]

Your pictures are beautiful. Sorry about the rain and not being able to get a rental car. Those bug bites look really nasty.
Liz

[KMB733]

Nice to see the sun finally made an apperance. Great pictures!

[DawnK]

Fleetwood Mac, huh? Good taste in music. Your pictures are beautiful again. The buildings are amazing to look at.

[Colexis Mom]

What great pictures of the town! Sounds like a nice day!

[chezp]

Friday 16 October – part one: “I thought they said wall to wall sunshine”

Despite the fact that the local radio station had last night claimed that we’d see (and I quote here!) “wall to wall sunshine” from Friday to Monday, in the middle of the night, we were both woken up by the rain pounding down on the roof. I went back to sleep, hoping that it would all be over by the morning. However, by the time we woke up just after 8am, the hammering of rain was still apparent outside. Mark got up, but I lay there a bit longer, thinking a lie-down protest at the weather seemed like a good day. It was so miserable outside, but I guess there was a reason why we couldn’t hire a car yesterday after all. You see, it was fate.




After starting the day in a decidedly Eeyore type of mood, I perked up, especially when the magic word “chocolate” was mentioned. One of the leaflets I picked up at the tourist information yesterday was all about the Museum of Chocolate, hosted by Valor in Villajoyasa, so that was to be our port of call for the day.

The first challenge was to be finding the place. We got to Villajoyasa easily enough, although the driving conditions were still pretty unpleasant, because of the rain, but fortunately nothing as bad as yesterday. Once we got there, we figured we’d have no trouble. After all, the leaflet gave us the address and we had the sat nav with us. We knew Dave and Barb had tried to find the place with no joy before, but this time we had an address, so surely all would be well?

I think you can guess straight away that it wasn’t. The sat nav seemed determined to take us down every no entry street we can across, with it insistently telling us to “turn right” with us all screaming at the thing “we can’t”!! It didn’t help that they seemed to be digging up the whole town and lots of roads were closed because of all the work they were doing.

After driving around for about 30 minutes and getting a few photos of the place on the way…




… we were beginning to lose the will to live. Finally we managed to head in the right direction and then found the right road. Ahead of us was the Valor factory, although it looked more like a hotel, as you’ll see from the photos in a moment. Now all we had to do was park. Yeah, right… I did begin to think that we’d be driving around for another 30 minutes, as we went up and down roads with no joy, including the same darned road we’d arrived in on almost an hour ago. It turned out the factory was just to the right. I don’t know whether the road wasn’t listed on the sat nav, but if it had only taken us that way, we would’ve been there in minutes.

Finally we came across some parking and asked a local woman in Spanish if we could park there and whether it was free. It turned out the answer to both questions was yes, but still we weren’t 100% convinced and found a parking space out on the road, safer we figured than parking inside an area that had gates that could be closed on us for no apparent reason.

We wandered over to the museum entrance, which was firmly locked. The leaflet had said something about tours every hour on the hour. OK, but I had assumed that there’d be somewhere to wait inside, maybe in a café or perhaps in an area with exhibits? : We were left standing outside and looking very lonely, as the first ones there. That feeling didn’t last long, as an elderly English couple arrived a few moments later and then an almost constant throng of people of all different nationalities, until there were probably about 40 of us waiting for the tour to start.

We were taken inside and I was able to grab a quick photo of the building. As I say, very unusual and not what you expect from a factory at all.



We were quickly split into two groups, with the Spanish speakers going into watch the movie about chocolate making first, while the English speaking group, who it turned out included Germans, Dutch and Norwegians, headed into the exhibition area. We were told a bit about the chocolate making process by Alicia, who spoke very good English. In fact, she had an accent to her, which indicated to me that she had spent some time in the UK, as she’d obviously picked up an accent from somewhere…

She explained how they use cocoa beans from three places around the world, one for the taste, one for the aroma and one for the cocoa butter they produce. It was all fascinating stuff.



Those of you who speak Spanish will be able to work out what this machine does!?








Once we were done in the exhibition, it was next door to see the film and we all learned a lot about Valor, which celebrated its 250th anniversary in 2006. We’d never heard of the company before, but apparently they export to more than 20 countries, including the UK, US and Japan. We saw some of the production facility and didn’t see more than about three or four people in any of the footage and, when we headed into the factory itself, it was the same story.

Sadly, you couldn’t take any photos inside the factory area, which was such a shame, as it was quite an undertaking. The heat and the smell in there was amazing and made me feel exceptionally hungry. Apparently, this place attracts between 60,000 and 70,000 visitors each year, who see 75 tons of chocolate being produced each day. Yes, you read that right, each day! It’s a 24-hour operation there and the only place you see people are in the testing side (wow, what a job! ) or the packing side, which is much cooler. We could see chocolates being boxed as we went round, although it didn’t look as if they were running at full capacity, which was understandable, as we were getting near to siesta time by now.

Finally, we were allowed into the final part of the tour, and like every good tour, they’d saved the best for last – their shop, selling Valor chocolates and allowing you to sample the merchandise! They had about five different types out, plain and milk chocolate with hazelnuts in, pure plain and pure milk chocolates and some milk chocolates with a filling in that we couldn’t quite work out – it seemed to be a mixture of strawberry or maybe orange. It was very nice, but sadly, there were no signs to tell you what you were sampling, which made finding those chocolates quite tricky.

I have to say that it was a bit chaotic in there as well. The Spanish part of our group had been in front of us and had descended in there first, ravaging a lot of the free samples and that group contained a number of school aged kids, who were exceptionally loud. Trying to get to some of the shelves to see what was on offer was quite difficult and I was quite glad when a lot of them cleared out and left some room for the rest of us.

We ended up getting a slab each of the non-sugar plain chocolate for my dad, who’s diabetic, as a Christmas present, a slab of plain and milk with almonds, milk with hazelnuts and pure cocoa chocolate with orange, all of which came to €12 (about $18), which I didn’t think was too bad. All in all, this place turned out to be a great find, especially as it’s free of charge, although I don’t doubt that they make all their money out of everyone buying chocolate at the end of the tour.

Next: a night out on our own

[ccmom]

Oooh, I was already hungy for chocolate, now I'm hungry for some really good chocolate. As always, your pictures are great.