Beside the road

Especially in the dark they can seem like little islands of human activity lost in the fastness of the night. They're usually nameless, at least at first. There's probably a bit of confusion as you drop off the motorway because you're not quite sure where to park up and the car controls, that you haven't used much, at least for the past couple of hours, prove a little awkward. You don't know quite where you are even though you know where you've been and where you're going and when you do finally get inside, into the artificial light, it's all a bit bright after hours of only peering into oncoming headlights. 

The Spanish call them restaurantes, or bares, de carretera. Like Transport cafés in the UK they have a certain aura of mystique. Sometimes it's for the decor, I remember being told about Casa Pepe at Despeñaperros, famous for its Nationalistic and Francoist decor, but generally the idea is that whilst these places may be a bit rough and ready some of them are culinary gems. This one does the best croquetas, that one has the best paella and the other has the best tortilla de patatas in Spain. Do a bit of Googling and you'll find any number of Spanish newspaper articles suggesting which are the best Restaurantes de Carretera. The newspapers may think they know the score but we all know that these places are really the preserve of long-distance lorry drivers, traffic police and the locals who live nearby.

The other week we were flying out of Barajas, the Madrid airport, Aeropuerto Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas if you prefer. The flight check in was at some ungodly hour and the timing made using the train infeasible. We had to drive, to drive overnight. Like most people on a long journey, we decided to stop to take on and to expel liquids. That journey reminded me of the strange world of the late-night cafés and restaurants sprinkled around the major arterial roads and motorways of Spain.

When I'm driving a decent distance I never think to plan where I'm going to stop. It's take pot luck, based on bladder control, my ability to keep my eyes open, and the Área de Servicio signs. Nowadays far too many of the signs take you to a petrol station with a tiny area set aside with a few stools and tables. The fare on offer usually includes such gastronomic delights as sweaty ham and cheese rolls in paper bags, overpriced Coke and coffee from a Nespresso type machine. Sometimes there are just vending machines. The 24hr tag is a cleverly baited trap.

Our first stop this time was at around four in the morning. It was one of those vast barn-like spaces decorated in muddy browns and greens with a huge bar topped with display cases, full of cakes and pastries or anchovies, octopus and Russian salad depending on the time of day. The bar area looked like it hadn't had a refit since 1987 and the lights, although I suppose they are no longer fluorescents, were just as unforgiving and did the job of picking out the sweat stain discolouration under the armpits of the distinctly off-white shirts worn by the serving staff, just as well. There were also other sales areas piled high with overpriced cheese and cold meats and, as we were in Albacete province, boxes full of miguelitos and showcases of Albacete knives presumably aimed at the forgetful traveller returning home to the bosom of their family. It was definitely a type. If there had been a rotating rack with music cassettes left over in the corner I wouldn't have been that surprised.

The clientele were a bedraggled crew. They were generally young men wearing expensive sportswear that still managed to look cheap. They had those shaved side footballer haircuts and a sort of slovenly look. They were almost certainly local. Not at all threatening or menacing but it must require a certain lifestyle to pop out to a not that happening motorway service area at four in the morning for a chat with pals. There were a couple of young women too, a bit on the heavy side and with bomber jackets and ice blue coloured jeans which reminded me, like the decor, of the 1980s. 

On the way back our stop was much earlier. maybe around 11pm. Again we were lucky when the random stop proved to be an eatery popular with locals from a nearby town. The place was brightly lit, had a sort of cafeteria look to it and had that loudness of Spaniards at table. 

Just after we sat down a couple of local police officers turned up joined minutes later by four Guardia Civil traffic officers in two cars. This is a sign of a good choice. The police hovered around the bar presumably swapping stories of derring do but the centre of attention in the main room was a group, probably an extended family group, of at least a dozen people tucking in to a mountain of snack type food, sandwich rolls, burgers, plates of tapas etc. They were finishing off. One lad, as wide as tall, was wearing lots of rapper style gold chains and a silk jacket with a DJ name emblazoned across the shoulders. He was hoovering up the remains of food from everyone's abandoned plates. This place too represented a style; modern, loud, a bit brash but not at all sanitised or internationalised and instantly comprehensible to any passing Spaniard from food to serving style. None of your self service here.

Maybe there's a PhD here for one of our renowned British Hispanists. "The role of roadside bars and restaurants in the formation of modern Spain". Or not.

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As always I've written about this before; when I was on an overnight coach. This is from 16 years ago. I notice it is much more concise! I have become more garrulous with years and kilos.

It's 4 am. The bus is parked up in a service station. The cafeteria area smells faintly of sick and bleach. The man who's been sitting next to me on the bus may well be Ethiopian or Somali - he looks like he's from that bit of Africa - but as he speaks neither English nor Castilian I'll never know. There are Moroccans too - lots of Moroccans - and South Americans, mainly Ecuadorians. In Albacete a man with henna in his beard wearing one of those long shirts and the obligatory nylon anorak got off. A few Spaniards too. No one looks rich. In fact, most look definitely poor. Like the plump woman in the tight ski pants, tight top and high heels to match her yellow accessories. The ensemble screams market stall. Four continents at least - Continental drift. The struggling poor. In the middle of the night, on a bus to Madrid.

As wise as courageous

The sweat was running in a little rivulet down my back. I noticed too that my damp hands had transferred the wood-stain on the handrails on to my beige trousers. The raffia work type chair had been uncomfortable from the start but I found myself wondering if Enver Hoxha's torturers had ever thought of the possibilities of dining chairs. Wearing a surgical mask wasn't helping. The daytime temperature had topped out at 41º C and it was still nice and warm as the performance got under way just after 9pm. Maggie, who was probably the only woman in the theatre without a fan, says she was on the verge of collapse from heat and pain. I suspect a fan may not have helped much!

On stage a harpist and three women, all dressed in black, were reciting poetry and singing songs based on the work of women like Santa Teresa de Jesús, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Olivia Sabuco, Ana Caro or María de Zayas. Women who lived and wrote in what is now called the Siglo de Oro (literally Golden Century), the Spanish Golden Age. That's a "century" that ran from 1492 till 1659 or maybe 1681 depending on who you listen to. Now, as you may imagine, my grasp of Sixteenth and Seventeenth Spanish poetry, even in modern translation, is relatively tenuous. It was easy for my mind to wander from the action on stage.

We were at the Classic Theatre Festival at Almagro in the Ciudad Real province of Castilla la Mancha watching Tan sabia como valerosa. The whole Festival is super popular and you have to be quick off the mark to get tickets. This year Covid played havoc with the event - was it going ahead or not? I went shopping for tickets the first day they went on sale and, for the venue we wanted, the Corral de Comedias, the only performance that had tickets left was the one we were at. The Corral is a timber framed open air galleried theatre - think of London's Globe Theatre and, although the buildings are quite different, you'll have the idea.

The original theatre on this site  was probably built at the end of the 16th Century, though nobody is quite sure when exactly. Mentions of the theatre in Almagro turn up every now and then in the records over the years but, after 1857, not a dicky bird. Then, in the 1950s, when the main square of Almagro was being rebuilt, bits and bats were found which pointed to the site once having being used as an open air theatre. When the stage was found, almost intact, behind a brick wall, it was decided to restore the area as a typical Siglo de Oro theatre. The first performance in the new space was in 1954 and that's the theatre we were sweating in on Sunday evening.

It was an event I'll remember. If I'm honest though my favourite bit was probably when a bat fluttered into the auditorium and briefly crossed the stage. Not something you normally get when you go to the theatre!

Out for a run in the motor

I went to Castilla la Mancha yesterday. Just the bottom bit, the part nearest home, bordering Murcia. I'd intended to go further, to a place called Argamasilla de Alba, one of the villages that claims to be the unnamed village where the Knight of the Sad Countenance lived, the one at the start of the el Quijote book. Then it dawned just how far it was so, when I was just about to join the Albacete bound motorway, I had a look at a paper map that I had in the car and chose a place that was in the middle of a bundle of mountains where the roads looked very wiggly. 

The place was called Riópar. I made a bit of a diversion to stop at a reservoir which the sign said was 6kms from the main road. It was actually over 18kms to the dam wall but it was an interesting run nonetheless. It was also the first time in Spain that the "beware deer" sign was telling the truth, at least for me - four deer bounded in front of the car and disappeared into the long grass. Riópar turned out to have next to nothing to look at. The bar I went to for a drink and a sandwich didn't even have toilets but they did offer sliced tomatoes on the sandwich which was another Spanish first for me.

In Riópar I set the SatNav for Alcaraz, which I vaguely thought I may have visited before. Jane, the SatNav voice, didn't get at all angry when I took no notice of her at the turn for Riópar el Viejo. Again there was nothing much to look at but an old looking church and a nicely disordered cemetery. On the drive to Alcaraz the car climbed through the sun dappled pine forests (well they looked like pines to me) and went through yet another pass that was over 1,000 metres - I'd gone over one earlier that was over 1,100 metres (3,608 ft) - and even as I drove home across a flat plain there was another. High country. Alcaraz was nice enough, I had been there before, with a main square full of big impressive buildings. There were nice views to the olive tree planted hillside opposite but in the whole day I probably walked less than a couple of kilometres. Most of the time I was in the car, windows open, radio loud enough to compete with the wind noise and often going slowly enough to appreciate the countryside I was passing through. 

And it was the countryside that I enjoyed most. Just driving through Spain. Whenever we go to the neighbouring town of Yecla Maggie comments on the beauty of wide valley, thick with vineyards, that we pass through. From Jumilla to the A30 motorway the road glides between mountain chains to left and right which, I don't know quite how to describe it, just reek of Spain. The colours, the dark hills, the bright crops, the dusty yet green valley floor, flat but rolling, tranquil yet always active. 

As I drove up the hillside from Riópar to Alcaraz the deserted road twisted and snaked like so many that I've driven in Spain. I could have stopped to take photos tens of times but I've tried it before. Photos don't capture the heat, the sounds, the smells or even the look. I've grown to really appreciate the landscapes we have all around us and even on the humdrum runs it often strikes me how beguiling it all is. But I did stop for one last snap, not far from Hellín. The plain went on and on and on as it so often does in Castilla la Mancha and the colours were stupendous. At least I think so.

Mind you I should add that I grew to love the Cambridgeshire Fens too so maybe I'm easily pleased.

Two down, three to go

Avoiding people who aren't looking where they are going because they are glued to their mobile phones is an unremarkable modern day hazard. I was surprised though by a couple of lads riding their bike down the pedestrianised bit of a tree lined avenue in Albacete yesterday. No hands riding for both as they scrutinised their phones with one saying that there was a Pokemon in another fifty metres. The next three groups of lads I passed were also engrossed in the display of their phones, apparently, also in search of Pokemons. Pokemon Go in Albacete?

I'd gone on the train for a bit of a lark. It was one of the mid distance trains so I was a bit surprised when the TV monitors revealed that the train was doing just a tad over 160 k/h. My ticket was on my phone. The lad next to me was watching an episode of Vikings on his laptop whilst he whatsapped to his chums and those rolling Manchego plains slipped by. Most of the passengers were doing something with their phone so that the woman with a paper newspaper seemed a bit out of place.

I have an English exercise I use with students on the subject of Spanish stereotypes pulled together from  a series of travel guides published in Russia, Japan, the UK etc. The cliches aren't the bulls and sangria type but things like body hair on women, particularly underarm and on legs, being socially unacceptable or that nobody gets drunk in public. One of these supposed cliches is that RENFE trains are clean and efficient. Both my trains were dead on time and clean.

Maybe I'm on a bit of a Munro type mission to bag all the provincial capitals of Castilla la Mancha - Ciudad Real last week and Albacete this. The city has a bit of a reputation for being boring and it's true that there's not a great deal to see  but it seemed very clean and tidy to me with lots of open spaces and a lot of greenery. It's not the first or even the tenth time I've been there but it was still a pleasant enough day out.

Part of that was down to the tourist office. I really appreciated that, after the question as to whether I could understand his Spanish or not, the man talked to me like any other tourist rather than as someone who knew nothing. He gave me a map with some tourist routes on it, explained what was open and what was closed (nearly everything) and sent me away.

That's it really. A bit of an empty post. I didn't even buy one of the knives the town is famous for. I actually meant to but a queue at the bank machine left me a bit strapped for a while and, by the time I'd monied up, the shop I went to had closed for an early lunch because of the reduced summer hours. It certainly was warm enough, around 36ºC and sunny which is a nice temperature for a city hike

And I forgot to buy cheese

In the end I wore jeans for both days. I'd packed shorts but they're not my favourite wear; I appreciate their functionality but I simply don't like them. I'd decided to go to Ciudad Real in Castilla la Mancha. I chose it because there is a train from our local station to Ciudad Real so, to be awkward, I decided to drive.

Castilla la Mancha is Don Quixote, El Quijote, country. A lot of it is a gently undulating plain covered with wheat, maize, sunflowers, vines and olive trees. There are other crops but as I couldn't identify them we'll pretend they don't exist. It's not that far from home, around 350kms. Most of the way I drove along long, arrow straight ribbons of almost empty tar surrounded by yellows, greens and earth redder than Tara. I drove with the windows open and a rebellious strand of hair whipping my face. I like aircon in cars less than I like shorts. I gurgled with delight at the openness of it all and the shimmering heat. I really like the flatlands of Castilla and it's dead easy to imagine Pancho, Rocinate and the Don trotting across the landscape heading for the next village. In Alicante and Murcia we have scattered houses all across the landscape, somebody told me it's because of the Moorish irrigation system, but in much of rural Spain people live in villages rather than in isolated houses. So La Mancha is generally empty land peppered with villages.

I thought this little snatch of poetry from Caminera by Enrique de Mesa sums it up nicely. Apologies for the translation.

Sol de mediodía. Castilla se abrasa.
Tierra monda y llana: ni agua, ni verdor,
ni sombra de chopo, ni amparo de casa.
El camino, blanco. Ciega el resplandor.

Noonday sun. Castilla bakes
Pared and flat, no water no green,
neither shade of poplars nor the protection of home.
The track, white. The brightness blinds.

On the day I set out the news was full of stories of an ola de calor, a heat wave, and one of the places predicted to be as hot as hell was Ciudad Real. In the end it wasn't that bad, it only got to 39ºC, but it was warm enough. The Tom Tom and Google maps were both confused as to the location of my hotel. The reason, it turned out, was that it was in the dead centre of the city in a pedestrianised zone. I asked a policeman for help and I followed his car up restricted entry roads. He left me on the paved area outside the hotel and the only way out was between a newsagent's kiosk and a flower stall and across a couple of pavements. Ciudad Real wasn't exactly boring, nice enough city, but not a lot to look at. In fact, for something to do, and to sit in the cool, I went to the pictures, Infierno Azúl, the one with Blake Lively and a shark - it was watchable enough.

On the way home I went to Aldea del Rey, Almagro, Villanueva de los Infantes and the wetlands near Daimiel. Almagro is famous for a theatre season, for a colonnaded main square and for a "Shakespearean" type theatre but all the villages I went to had big red stone churches, the grand houses of rich families, rows of white houses with balconies and fancy ironwork and shops with impossibly old fashioned window displays. It wasn't that sunny but it was plenty warm and I wandered around taking snaps and drinking copious amounts of non alcoholic beer and a sort of hand made lemon slush puppy called granizado. The bars were, like Andalucía, very generous with the tapas.

Daimiel, as well as being a village is the name for one of Spain's fifteen National parks. It's a wetland fed by the Guadiana River and a place with lots and lots of wildlife, particularly birds. I got there at around three in the afternoon and I fully expected that it would be locked firm shut but, although the information office and the shop were closed, there was nothing to stop me wandering around to my heart's content. Nice place I thought.

And that was it, a bit of a jaunt, something to break the routine for a couple of days.

Just a note, it's a long time since I drove along it but I think it's the A9 in Scotland, possibly the bit in the Cairngorms looking at a map, that is just lovely to drive. Good surface, swooping bends with the occasional stag to be spotted alongside. The N322 from Villanueva de la Fuente to San Pedro doesn't have as many stags but that's a hoot of a road too.

Keeping schtum

Everyone knows that Brits in Spain wear socks with sandals, go bright red in the sun and swill beer. One of those conversational topics, designed generally to use comparatives in English, with students is about countries. We always agree that one difference is on the Tube. In London everyone keeps to themselves, reading or simply looking grim faced. In Madrid on the other hand the babble between passengers is drowned out only by the occasional impromptu musical jam session.

I was in Madrid the last couple of days and I'm sad to report that everyone on the metro is now glued to their mobile phones. For business suits and skaters alike their thumbs are dancing across screens catching or killing things. Earphones are everywhere to block out the surrounding world. Mobile phones, the great leveller.

Madrid looked very green too. Trees all over the place and that's without going anywhere near the Retiro. Busy of course but then, if you lived in Culebrón, most places would seem busy to you too. And expensive; it's not that paying 2.20€ or 2.50€ for a bottle of beer or 4€ for a tapa is too bad really but we generally pay about half of that so the final bill can be a bit of a surprise. And exciting - flash motors on the street, odd and stylish characters in equal measure, galleries, museums and events everywhere. And, best of all in the recently renamed Aeropuerto Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Maggie popped out of one of the doors with a cartload of luggage which means she gets to eat pork and drink wine and I get my playmate back.

Billowing skyward

Nuclear Power Plants always take me a bit by surprise. I remember the first time I saw the one at Heysham when I was catching the ferry to the Isle of Man. It was just there. No more fuss about it than a bus station or an industrial estate.

Today as we passed the Cofrentes Power Station I thought it sobering that alongside the enormous, and picturesque, steam cloud coming from the twin cooling towers, was a nuclear reactor which might, at any time, do a Fukishima or Chernobyl and start killing and polluting for generations to come. On a sunny and crisp December day it just looked tranquil. The cooling towers plonked in the middle of the landscape weren't quite so romantic but the fluffy steam clouds rising to play with the vapour trails left by passing jet planes seemed very peaceful. Much more peaceful than the busy blades of the hundreds of wind turbines in the area. There are windmills dotted along the top of nearly every ridge in the borderlands of Valencia, Castilla la Mancha and Murcia.

Spain currently has eight nuclear reactors running on six sites. Two more reactors are in the process of being dismantled after suffering "incidents." Within the last few weeks the operators of the Santa María de Garoña plant in Burgos have said that they will close that plant down ahead of schedule to avoid paying a new tax which will cost its owners approximately €150 million per year.

The largest percentage - 33% - of electricity production in Spain comes from renewables of one sort of another. Next up is nuclear with around 21% and then come the combined cycle with about 19% of the power generation. I presume that the missing percentages are from the older non combined cycle power stations.

Iberdrola, the people who send us our electric bill, own Cofrentes. It produces 1,110 megawatts. I have no concept of a megawatt fortunately the operators make it clear that this is a lot. They say that Cofrentes could, singlehandedly, provide all of the domestic supply for the three provinces of Valencia. In 2010 the plant ran faultlessly for 365 days without any halt in production and provided nearly 5% of all the electricity used in Spain that year.

The website of the Nuclear Safety Council mentions that all of the reportable events since 2005 at Cofrentes have been Level 0 on the International Scale of Nuclear Events - that is ones which have "no safety significance." However, between 2001 and 2011 Cofrentes made 25 unplanned shutdowns and reported 102 security events three of them at Level 1 which is classified as an anomaly but where there is still significant defence in depth.

The Nuclear Event Scale has three levels of incident and four levels of accident. Chernobyl and Fukishima are way out at the front at the moment on Level 7. The 1957 Winscale Fire was a Level 5 event, on a par with Three Mile Island in 1979. Sellafield has also had five Level 4 accidents between 1955 and 1979. In Spain the biggest incident to date, Level 3, was at  Vandellos in 1989 when a fire destroyed many of the control systems and meant that there were almost no safety systems remaining. Vandellos is one of the two plants that are being decommissioned at the moment.

I don't suppose there are quite the same sort of specific accident and incident scales for bus stations and industrial estates.

Driving around in my automobile

A normal looking car park.?
I suppose it depends what you expect
a car park to look like

On a clear night we can watch the aeroplanes spiralling down towards Alicante airport some 55kms from Culebrón. Last night there were four or five, their lights twinkling, waiting their turn to land. It was a warm night, still close to 30ºC at around 10pm and I was sure that the new arrivals would be well pleased as they headed for their hotels or apartments on the coast. Beaches and sun, that's what they'd paid for and that's what they were going to get.

We've just been on a bit of a jaunt ourselves. We had a shopping list of things to do. A couple of Royal Palaces, a provincial capital that I'd never visited before and a deep river valley that had won the "Best view in Spain" on a TV programme. Most of our destinations were vaguely within the circle of towns that circle Madrid though we also went a bit further North and East into the province of Soria. We were a long way from the sun and sangria beaches or, indeed, from the high green mountainous areas of the North and South, but there were still plenty of tourists. Voices and languages from around the World. We cruised kilometre after kilometre of gently undulating countryside, shimmering in the heat, covered in cereal crops and sunflowers with the occasional high mountain pass. There were a surprising number of rivers too. We don't have a lot of flowing rivers in Alicante or Murcia.

We didn't hurry and we didn't try to cram too much in but we still did about 1600kms in four days because Spain is quite a big country - two spots that look like close neighbours on a map can be a surprising distance apart.

I enjoyed every step of the way. I still enjoy travelling around Spain. There is always something new to see, something new to do and something new to eat. An odd thing though is that whilst it is always new and always different it is also re-assuringly familiar. I commented on that to Maggie at one point as we negotiated a distinctly Spanish road junction and she replied that of course it was because Spain is our home.

Just on the food, if you ever find yourself in El Burgo de Osma and a waiter recommends careta to you avoid it like the plague. It's pigs snout and it tastes horrid.

I took a lot of snaps. The majority of them are on this link if you want to look.

In a place of La Mancha, whose name I would not like to remember...

Don Quixote, el Quijote, usually billed as the greatest book ever written in Spanish, is big tourist business in Castilla la Mancha and this weekend we took a short break based in Campo de Criptana a town where there a number of old style windmills just right for tilting at.

In el Toboso, the village where el Quijote's imaginary lady Dulcinea lived we went to a small museum full of hundreds of copies of the various editions of the book, in every conceivable language, signed by the famous and infamous alike including names like Margaret Thatcher, Benito Mussolini, Nelson Mandela and Carlos Fuentes. On the museum wall a painting showed a thin bloke, lance in hand, riding a skinny horse and by his side a tubby man riding a mule. The four figures are dwarfed by a dazzling azure sky and the parched earth that stretch on and on for ever.

We've crossed through la Mancha several times on our journeys to and from Madrid or up to Albacete. That painting tallied exactly with my impression of the landscape - flat, featureless and dusty - dotted with mean villages and tedious towns. A landscape that I've read has its charms - but only after long acquaintance.

Our weekend started in Campo de Criptana with a tour of a winery, a meal and our hotel. The windmills were there looking as they should and the town gleamed in blue and white. El Toboso village was stone, sun and silence whilst the Ruidera Lakes were a hubbub of hundreds of people shattering the peace and quiet. In Alcaraz's magnificent town square we wondered where the money had come from. We climbed hills and dropped into deep valleys, we drove across kilometres of vineyards, through stands of oak and olive, we passed castles, rivers and streams - a varied and often changing landscape.

Alonso Quixano and his trusty sidekick Sancho Panza must have seen a thing or two as they rode into the heat haze all those years ago