Saturday 23rd March – Castellar de la Frontera to Rota

Castellar de la Frontera to Rota - 110 miles

Awoke to a somewhat cloudy, windy but warm day in no rush as we were planning on being a bit flexible for a while. So after breakfast and the usual seeing to the van, we decided to take a ride up to Sanlucar de Barramedar, a place we've stayed before and loved, but we had heard about some difficulties with motorhome parking there – however we had an alternative planned.

But first Bertie was in dire need of a thorough wash so having identified a suitable place yesterday, we went back to Los Palomes and spent €10 on a thorough jet-wash, before taking to the motorway once more with a now fully serviceable TomTom in charge.

The problem with satnavs is that they need to be kept up to date and as we hadn't done this, whilst at Mohammedia we'd given it a try. All we needed to do was connect to the internet and, yes, there were a few map updates waiting so off we go. Until our Maroc internet expired, which had the effect of deleting the existing maps – they were still there but we couldn't get at them....... We subsequently tried again several times but were only finally successful yesterday afternoon once we had re-connected to a new simcard with lots of gigabytes to play with. Lesson learned!

So TomTom did his stuff and took us straight to a campsite outside of Sanlucar. No, that's not where we wanted to be so reprogrammed the old-fashioned way, that is using lat/long, and tried again. That worked but on arrival we were not surprised to find the aire had been closed down, as well as it's associated service point. It's a real shame because it's a lovely town to visit but we guess it became a victim of its own success – we had heard of problems whilst it had been in use.

We did see, however, a large beachside parking area just outside the town with several motorhomes parked on it and no apparent restrictions so we went there for lunch in the now blazing hot sunshine. Unfortunately it was also very exposed to the still very strong winds so we elected not to stay longer and instead headed for our alternative at Rota.

Rota is known for it's large US Navy base, but the aire is well away from that, in a nice beach-side location that was reasonably protected from the wind by large sand dunes. Only a few spaces left, we squeezed in then took Jamie for a quick run down to the beach before returning to spend the rest of the day relaxing.