Arboleas and Albox

We went on a small road trip yesterday - it was just under an hour's drive inland to a couple of places that we had seen featured on the TV programme 'A Place In The Sun'.

The TV programme made the two places that we intended to visit look like very desirable places to live!

Our first stop was Arboleas.  The temperature was a nice 26 degrees today, so it wasn't too hot for a explore of the village.

As per usual Elaine did her bit and cleared up some rubbish.  To be fair, on the whole the Spanish towns and villages are very clean compared to the UK.  This could be down to the fact that there are bins everywhere or it could be that there is no one around! 

We walked to the top of the local watchtower to get a view of the village and its surroundings.

This is looking down on the dry river bed.  As I have mentioned before it must be amazing when it rains. We are not holding our breaths that we will see any though!  We did a quick Google search to see if there were any pics of it in flood and found this vid from 2012, which is interesting and quite unbelievable really!

There were a few clouds around today too ...

Arboleas was an OK little town but we didn't find much there to write home about really! We were trying to find the picturesque spots they found to film in the programme we had seen!  There was just one place by the town hall, which had a tree-lined walkway going down to it.  We could just imagine Jasmine strutting her stuff down there, extoling the virtues of the town!  The villas there are no doubt amazing inside though.  We did see quite a few expats around but we just couldn't see the draw of living there ourselves ... it was way too quiet and isolated for us.

We had a quick drive around one of the outlying hamlets before we moved on - we were glad we weren't in the motorhome, with all the tiny, winding streets - they were tight enough in the car!

A local church, which is quite pretty ...

Our next stop was Albox, which is a much bigger town.  Once again there was a dry river bed running through the middle of the town ... |

We quickly discovered that they were gearing up for a huge Fiesta.  We went to have a look in the entertainment / beer tent but the music was deafening, so we lasted for all of 5 mins!

We walked through the town and found a bar, which we found was run by poms!  We had a nice lunch there but we were the only customers ...

We loved the mixed sex toilet in there....very odd!  Only in Spain ...

We continued our walkabout through the streets and decided that the Spanish 'do' doors very well indeed ...

As per usual it was deserted ...

This is the main street, everything was shuttered up and closed though as it was siesta time ...

Obviously siesta time is a very Spanish custom going back thousands of years, but in this day of air conditioning etc you would have thought that a few places would stay open rather than shutting shop for 3 hours in the afternoon.  Personally, I couldn't think of anything worse than going back to work at 17.00 and working through to 20.00!  I guess it is what you get used to.

We headed back to Mojacar with the thought that we could never live in Inland Spain, it would definitely have to be on the coast!  It was so good to get back to 'our seaside town' again!

At about 21.00 we headed down to the the centre of Mojacar, where we believed that a band was playing, but we believed wrong!  Oops, it was a ghost town ... we seemed to have got our dates wrong!

Oh well, we thought we would go for a drink at a local bar, who usually had a band / music playing on a Friday night (The Irish Rover).  When we got there we found they had a halloween party going on ... so there were lots of ghouls and ghosts there, including a lot of juvenile ones who were running around all over the place screaming and generally wreaking havoc, so we gave that a miss!  

We knew there was also party on at the Beachcomber bar just along the front a little way, so we thought we would have a look in there next but it was the same scenario there as the Irish Rover - pandemonium!

Next stop, we thought we would call in to another bar (The Emerald Isle) just down the road from our apartment ... oops, that was shut!  

OK, final try ... we went to the 'Rusty Nail' which was open but only had two people in it, so we had a quick Guinness, gave up and went 'home'!

Bit disappointing for a Friday night ... I guess the halloween parties that were going on in the two bars, had taken what custom is still around from the outlying bars.  I think that Mojacar is now starting to close down for the winter ... no problems though, as there are still heaps of bars and restaurants ... they can't all close can they?!!!