Memories of our first visit

In the process of packing, tidying and turfing, I came across the most wonderful piece of history the other day - it was Zack's 2005 scrapbook.

I decided when we very first came to Spain in our gorgeous Fiat Ducato Concorde motorhome that we should chart our journey, so armed with a Collage kit, cheap felts and a lot of glue, we set about sticking and scribbling and drawing a page a day to remind us of our wonderful adventure.

Looking through it again, I was reminded of the middle part of the "christening" we had here - Spain's way of whetting our appetite as to what was to follow. It went like this :

We had spent a few days with a travel bug in Ampolla - the rice growing peninsula that pokes out above Benicassim and below Tarragona - neither of us being very well it was a great place to park up and recuperate. When we were better, we set sail, so to speak, for this very village - Rubielos de Mora - for the simple reason that it was en route to Teruel and I had seen something about Teruel on the television!

We looked at our map, and decided to take the more direct route through the mountains - Morella and then down down down through Nogeruelas to our final destination. It all looked SOOOOO easy!

We set off, great roads (of course - we were still in the Community of Valencia!) - and then found the road we needed to wind down to Rubielos - it went vertically up a mountain beside us with hairpin bends all the way! Not to be daunted, the tarmac being smooth, clear and fresh, I set off with my son at my side.

Ten minutes of uphill but decent driving and the signs changed - Welcome to Aragon in effect - and OH MY - at that immediate point, so did the ROAD. The tarmac stopped, the road narrowed, and the cliff edge suddenly had no barrier.

I have never gulped so hard in all my life. There I was, "totally in control" with my just five year old little boy trusting in my every decision, teetering on the edge of the worst road I had ever seen, thousands of feet up, with absolutely NO means of turning my 6m wagon around! There was nothing for it - onwards and upwards and forwards it was, clenching the steering wheel until my knuckles ached, singing songs my father used to sing as we bumped and lurched our way through the potholes.

But the moment that utterly split my knife edge stomach knots was when we rounded a corner - and I MEAN a corner, and there in front of us were hundreds and hundreds of sheep and goats all coming straight at us!! There was no road to be seen for the bobbing woolly mass of movement! So we simply switched the engine off, and enjoyed the show.

That night, once settled on our new campsite, my son got out his collage set and started creating an ocean of woolly sheep with cotton wool blobs and stick legs - and then started dotting the page with tiny black dots absolutely everywhere. And when I asked why? "That's the sheep poo Mummy". !!!