Wow – I think we have to seriously slow down our pace. There is a certain flow while traveling that seems like it can be maintained, but in fact slowly drains your reserves. Even though we already had two double stays – that is still only about half of the rest days we did on Home to Home. We were not really resting either, but packing these extra days full of sightseeing. Within a week, we need a proper rest day – just hanging around the camp and doing not much of anything. Or more likely, doing whatever we feel like. But not today …

Today started great, with a solid breakfast and a kind fellow camper offering to pick up a fresh bread for us from the bakery. But catastrophe is never far away. In this case, it came with the very last touch of breaking camp for us: the last clasp of the roof tent. It is sort of a normal leaver lock thingy, with a latch affixed to the base hooking into the lock and then leveraged shut to keep it all good and tight. Too tight this time, as it appeared. We had issues with closing the tent before, but we thought were past it. Right when the lock shut, the latch, which is a riveted band of steel, broke at the point where it is was attached to the base plate. One lock is not enough for safe travel, obviously. One again, the kindness of strangers helped to soften the blow immensely. The Dutch travellers next to us had his motorbike with him and carried a bunch of spare tie downs. With a colour matched botch job in place of a front lock. We called the distributor in Germany and they promised to find out what they can do for us, but in the meantime ensured us the tie down will do.

It did not really quite show yesterday, but the village and the national park surrounding us was absolutely stunning. Sierra Espuña is the first of a bunch of these alpine national parks that seem almost too inviting to just pass through. On a longer trip, we would definitively want to spend 2-4 days on some hikes in the area. But not this time. It would immediately go against the bare bones of a plan that we have started to formulate.

Our idea now is to travel just slow enough to get a taste of southern Spain but fast enough to be in Portugal before May. That should give us four weeks to really take our time and do exactly these things we are now skimping on a bit and leave us with two weeks to get back via the Netherlands at a reasonable pace.

That meant skipping a whole bunch of national parks now, and even just cruising past the Sierra Nevada in a single day. We did, for the most part. Even though, we still managed to have a great lunch break in a romantically drizzly national park called Sierra de Baza.

We had a very specific goal in mind: We needed a camp ground within striking distance of Granada with good WiFi and at a reasonable price. We managed the first, but the mobile data speeds were at least good enough to save our plan a bit. The thing is: We are not as untethered as on our last trip. We did not want to leave our weekly gaming group hanging, so we agreed to try out playing online via web and skype. It actually worked out reasonably well, with some minor hiccups that were to be expected. 

The only thing that we did not fully take into consideration for the choice of camp was altitude. And so we ended up at almost 1000 m, with a cold evening turning into an even colder, since cleare night. The thermometer dropped all the way down to 1° C for the second time on out trip …

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