Surprisingly, there were no aires, as such, within viable range, but good old Park4night came up trumps with a “Service area without parking” at La Puebla de Valverde. Where Park4night did get it wrong was the coordinates which I could see would require me to drive quite a long way up the motorway in the wrong direction just so as to be able to turn around to come back to access the slip road where the service area allegedly was. It was actually just off the roundabout at the end of the slip road, so no unnecessary shenanigans on the motorway were required at all. Also, it was pretty clean, when I’d been expecting the worst, so thank you CEPSA.

Next objective was Teruel for LPG. We’d last filled up about 9 days earlier, and we never ever need to hookup anywhere, so LPG has been our sole source for room heating, water heating, refrigeration, and cooking. We were only down to half a bottle, which I think is pretty good. So at Repsol, where I tend to get my LPG (but not Diesel, as I don’t find it has the keenest prices), I added the required 9 litres, which cost less than €6. What an amazingly cheap commodity – wouldn’t be without it.

Those who’ve followed our blog, at http://www.mlarb.com, over the years will know that we are great Lidl fans. So, other than a quick dash into the Carcassonne branch for a few essentials (bread, zero beer, lemons etc), today was to be our first proper Lidl shop in almost 2 weeks. Teruel‘s Lidl is squeezed in the town rather than in its own area, but there was parking outside, so happy days.

We enjoyed the indulgence of our shop, then headed off to our potential overnighting spot. En route, Sophie asked why there was a receipt around our windscreen wiper. Our hearts sank, it was a parking fine. For us, this was the first time in our Europe/wide experience that parking outside a Lidl was prohibited or required a disc. On reflection, there were other establishments there, and on leaving we did notice that Lidl had an undercover parking area (hardly suitable for us motorhomer types). We debated the whys and wherefores, but it had been a long day and I was tired, so we agreed that despite the seeming injustice, we must have done something wrong, and so let’s just pay the €60, chalk it up to experience, and move on. However, feeling more refreshed in the morning, after going online in an attempt to pay, and failing, I emailed the Teruel authorities and thought, what the heck, and pleaded for mercy. I don’t expect any, but at least we’ll feel we tried. It’s the weekend so it’ll be a couple of days before we hear anything.

So, back to my objective for the night, a dam and reservoir about 12k out of Teruel. It was a Friday night so we knew there’d be a risk of youngsters with cars and on arrival could see from the current clientele that there’d likely be a lot of movement for quite a number of hours, and so took the quick decision to move on. In fact, one boy racer nearly took us out as we negotiated a tight corner on our departure.

We then had Albarracin in our sights.