la Vall d'Uixó

We were woken up early this morning at 7:30 by the same mr noisy that walked past us shouting on Saturday night. I had assumed they were drunk then but now I’m not so sure. I climbed out of bed, threw my jogging bottoms in and a T-shirt and then jumped out the door. I do hate being woken up by noisy inconsiderate people so I was quite up for giving this guy a piece of my mind.
I could still hear him as clear as day as I moved further away from Wanda into the olive grove but he was nowhere to be seen. Then I climbed up onto an old wall and I could see him.
There were 2 men walking up the main road about 150 meters away and they were just talking. These 2 must have the loudest voices in Spain.
I went back to Wanda and told Ellie how far away they were. She couldn’t believe it either because they did sound like they were right outside the window.
At 8am after a couple of coffees we unmade the bed and had breakfast and at 9:30am we left the olive groves of Artana for our next destination.
Today was going to be another short drive of just 15 miles to the large town of La Vall d’Uixõ, and it took us just 40 minutes to get there taking a relatively slow pace. We would be staying in the parking lot of the caves of St Joseph. This was the whole reason we had been hanging around in this area. The tickets are booked for 10:30am tomorrow but we can stay in the motorhome area for upto 48hrs free of charge so we thought we’d get there a day early and check the area out.
We arrived around 10:30am and the smallest car park was already busy, but to my delight the motorhome area was completely free except for one lonely vanlifer.
We levelled up and made tea and then decided to go for a walk. We headed towards town first of all to see the old Roman viaduct following the path of the dried up river. It looked like they had tried to make a bit of a feature of the viaduct at one point with a large park area at the bottom but the park was now quite overgrown the path that lead through it was covered in dog poo and once you were in the park we had no access to the viaduct and there was no information.
We turned around and headed back towards the car park and then we headed up the steps to where the caves were.
The area was packed with people because today is a bank holiday in Spain for all saints day and normally you have to book tickets for the caves but for halloween they do tickets in the door and it’s called Jurassic Park/Jurassic Caves. The queues to get in were massive.
From the entrance to the caves we headed up to an old hermitage above the caves and some ancient ruins. There was a timeline with the ruins and they dated back to 10,000 years before Christ. All that is left now are foundations from the Roman period.
After that we went back to Wanda for lunch and at 2pm I was getting restless so checked my bike app for trails in the area, I found a relatively short ride that said it would take around 3 hours so I loaded my water bottles, put on my Lycra and headed off.
Most of the climbing I had to do was within the first 8km and it was a real struggle climbing up a never ending 15% gradient. I didn’t want to stop until I was sure the big climbs were done and I felt like I’d been out for ages. I was trying to work out how far I thought I might have come and as the ground looked like it levelled off I took a sneaky look at my phone. I had ridden nearly 9km. The tough gradients were done. I took time to recover and get my breath back before starting my first decent and when the decent did come I was flying down at 50kph. Even on the gravel sections I was doing 48kph.
I took an hour off the estimated ride time of 3 hours by completing it in 2hrs 20mins and covered 45 kilometres, burning off 1100 calories.
By the time I got back to Wanda at 5pm I was ready for a shower and dinner.
I put the hot water on, clipped my bike onto the back and covered it and Ellie started dinner while I jumped in the shower.
At 7:20pm the car parks are still packed, we think most people must be using the restaurants up near the caves and there’s still runners, walkers and people playing tennis even though it is dark.
We don’t think this is going to be a very peaceful place to sleep but we are where we need to be for the morning and it is only one night. To top it off we’ve still only paid €5 for parking since we left home.En savoir plus