Okey dokey, so we left Moncofa on the north east coast of Spain on saturday morning and made our way south to Almeria! Now although the roads in spain are good, the tolls slightly cheaper than France and the drivers slightly tamer than the Italians... we have to say, the views aren't that great! I never imagined Spain to be so barren, so brown and the further we got, so desert like!! Then I certainly didn't expect to be staying in the remotest little village in the heart of spains desert either, but we were! Now one thing we've realised is that AIRBNB ain't great at spanish addresses... our papers said Almeria but we were actually in Escullar, Almeria so we had actually driven further than we needed to!!! The apartment however was very cosy and the mod cons were better than those in the new apartment in Moncofa! We had one full day here and having thought naively that this National Park would be a forest of fun for the kiddies.. we had to make alternative plans! Thanks to TripAdvisor we discovered Oasys Mini Hollywood.. a western style theme park originally used to film the old cowboy movies! It had a full size cowboy town where they put on shows with horses and shoot outs, a zoo and best of all a huge swimming pool with slides and sunbeds! It really was quite a bizarre place...I lay cooling off in this luxury pool, looking around me at wall to wall desert, wondering where the hell I was!?! Twas a fun day for all! We had a chilled evening, did a load of washing in the machine which had the longest washing cycle in history.. so much so we had a power cut!

Now, then comes Monday and we were off again.. this time, even further south to Algeciras, at the very foot of Spain. We were due on the 6pm ferry to Tanger-Med but ho hum.. the Spanish don't do anything quickly.. we checked in 90 minutes before and then sat like hot sardines for way too long! What is it with us and ferry delays? The ferry finally left 2hrs later than it should! The boat was quite nice, but weirdly we had to queue for immigration controls and get our passports stamped whilst we were crossing! We went out on deck at sunset and any doubts about travelling with the children vanished all over again when I realised they were experiencing a journey by sea, where they could see Europe behind them and North Africa ahead of them!
Those doubts were yet to be tested! We got off the boat reasonably quickly and had to hand in our vehicle form at immigration! Now, I checked with AA international before we left and the only documents you sometimes need when taking a car abroad is a Green card and/or an International driving permit! Now Morocco didn't require either of these, but guess who got picked on for having the only British car... oh yes! They decided they wanted the original registration document.. but what they really wanted, was some cash! Aydin played it cool, stuck to his guns and got us through! I wasn't even allowed to get stroppy as they didn't want a woman's involvement! We finally got through, no say nav, no Internet, no dirhams and it was too dark to map read! Again, AIRBNB let us down with addresses, we headed out to Tetouan, which was wrong and added another hour etc to our journey! It was after midnight, the kiddies were tired but dozing and aydin and I were getting very stressed. We finally got to Tanger, called the guy and he came and rescued us and took us to our flat! It was 2am before we clambered into bed! I had a good old cry and fell asleep!