Quite a Day!

As we sit in the van, a glass of wine in hand, we gaze out across the Golfo de Almeria through a cracked windscreen and reflect on an 'interesting' day.

It all started this morning (obviously) as we headed east out of the snowy and mountainous Sierra Nevada and descended into the Tabernas Desert, apparently Europe's only desert. If you dig deeper you may find that it's only a semi-desert, but whatever it is we picked the only day in the year when it rains! Actually it was just a few raindrops and it soon brightened up to something one expects of desert-like weather.

Our visit here was two fold, firstly we enjoy scenery and have wanted to see 'first hand' this so called desert, and secondly, it's where all the spaghetti westerns were filmed so we wanted to visit Sweetwater, or whatever pseudo name was used for the filmset.

As we arrived at the ramshackle old hut, loosely masquerading as a check-in, I was held at gunpoint and robbed of 22 euros for the pleasure of driving down a dusty and bumpy track to Sweetwater. Parking on the outside of the fort entrance, we moseyed into town. There were several horses tied up at the stables to our left, and to our right the gallows in front of the sheriff's office. As we swung into the saloon the piano stopped playing (actually there wasn't a piano, just classic spaghetti western music being piped through the tannoy), with several gun-slinging cowboys propping up the bar. Every now and then there'd be the sound of a gunshot, which was quite unnerving as you never knew who was going to bite the dust. Actually I'll stop this drivel and let the photos do the talking when we eventually get WiFi.

After we'd seen all we wanted we rode out of town eastwards expecting some great desert scenery but were disappointed, the best we saw was near the filmsets. We stopped for lunch and planned our overnight stop, we plumped on the Cabo de Gata peninsular just east of Almeria. En route a stone was thrown up by a van which put 2 x 10" cracks across the windscreen. Hopefully we'll get a new one fitted tomorrow, but for the time being all we can do is open a bottle of wine, and take in the uninterrupted view of the sea just 50 metres away.