Valencia!

We had left Tarragona, managed to get to Valencia thanks to using cooking oil in the diesel tank, and the Mexican wasnt with us anymore.. this was all happening in 2011 and so many memorys and photos are lost!

The second day we woke up to more grey weather,

I remember Ryan said he felt like a "pig in shit" with the extra space he had to use for sleeping. We took the long walk to the city to check it out and to buy some things we needed for the "Orange Juice" idea. We found a chinease shop that sold pritty much everything at a very cheap price and we found a citrus squeezer and some plastic cups for our 2 euro.
We where in a park in the center which was very long and quite narrow with alot of bushes and trees, and we came acoss 2 guys with dogs sat under a bridge and I suggested to Ryan that we go say Hi. It looked like they were also traveling and were obviously at home there under the bridge. It wasnt a bridge over water , there was a road going over the park itself. We went and said Hi and they were quite sketchy (suspicious) at first but we sat down and relaxed and soon we were enjoying the conversations. Their English was quite bad and they were from Switzerland and speaking Swiss-German. Puk was a small punk and Hans was more with hippy clothes. They had Red, this was Puks rottweiler who was just still a puppy and then Hans had Talla a nice black dog not sure what breed to call it, like a border collie size. They had been staying there a week playing guitar for passers by and Puk wanted to show us that the bridge sent and echo to the other end and he ran off over to the other end of it to show what he ment. He was talking at a normal loudness and was around 75m away, but yet we could here in as if he was stood there still with us. And so we spoke back to him and the sound was carried all that way at the same volume. Best bridge I ever sat under!

We took a walk along the huge park and told them about our plan to make juice and sell it. They thought we were mad but anyway helped us with it. After a time we found a route where there were many joggers and found a place where we thought to set up.
We ended up going back to my van and as the Swiss guys had been in Valencia a while , we asked them if they had any weed. We were completely broke until we would go and try sell pancakes and the juice and Puk went of to buy some. It was great to have landed at a quiet place with no police or traffic wardens around, im sure where we parked up on the beach would have been packed out in the summer time. I remember we sat outside and smoked some and made some pasta in the van, and I of course felt it only natural to offer them a place to sleep in the van instead of under the bridge. After taking out all the manderines and rearranging the van there wasnt actually enough room for 3 on the floor and 2 dogs squeezed somewhere in between. Luckily Ryan or one of the Swiss, I cant remember, had a tent and so they just put it up on the beach and slept there.

Heres the only picture that I can find of me and the Swiss guys , Puk middle, Hans right

The next morning it was time to go get some money for diesel and as we were so far away we thought best just to go sell juice instead of carrying the pancake stuff there as well. Hans, the night before had said that they where on their way to Granada to visit a friend who lived in a cave and that as I had a van and no plan,that we should all go there in it. That sounded good to us so now we had a direction and it sounded a great place. Hans said he had been there once and it was very easy to recycle food, there were many student partys and tourists and also most of all women!
We loaded up the rucksacks full of manderines and started to walk to the city. Missions. They weighed so much that the manderines at the bottom had started dripping out from the rucksacks as we entered the city. This is when we learnt that it was something like 8km or even 8 miles walk each way from the city to the beach, no wonder it felt a long way!
I remember quickly seeing a random shopping trolley and ran across the road to grab it laughing with joy as it was just what we needed at that time.
We arrived at the park back to the spot we had found the day before and used some kind of metal cabernit that was concreted in the ground, most likely full of electric cables on the side of the pathway. We stuck a sign on it, put a cloth over it and a jug with plastic cups and a load of manderines in a shopping trolley behind us.
Time to get squeezing them manderinas! One was squeezing and the other stood trying to stop the passing joggers tempting them with manderine juice. Hans and Puk were just chilling of in the distance laughing at us trying to sell bitter manderine juice. We tried for 5 hours and only one woman who was passing brought a cup for 25 cent. She took a taste of it and said, "Wow thats disgusting!- Its Manderine juice!"

We packed up and decided that it was time to stay with just the pancakes and try again tomorrow in a new spot. I had the idea that we should try at least to sell the manderines that werent squashed and so we found a couple of shops selling them and I went to ask if they would buy them. One shop offered to buy the lot for 2 euros hahaha. We thought better of it and kept them , they tasted great anyway and were obviously nutritious. So we started the long walk back this time though with the trolley to haul the manderines and it was much easier. On the way to the van Hans said that they had 20 euro they could put in for diesel, so suddenly we were free birds again and I said that we could head off as soon as we got back to the van. Everyone was happy, new people, new friends, and a destination of a place called Granada.

By the time we were ready to leave it was already dark. But that didnt matter, I was good to drive a good few hundred kms and anyway I drove chilled , doing no more than 80km to get the best fuel consumption plus I really was in no rush whatsoever. I found this pic of us leaving Valencia, I remember that it was soooo fucking confusing driving in the city, the gps was broken and it was to mad to try and read a map, and none of us spoke any Spanish - it was a nightmare and we actually used up most 20 euro of diesel in 4 hours trying to leave Valencia. Our next stop would be at Benidorm, I had only new it as a holiday resort and was full of hope to find some kind of work there to get some easy money as I knew there were many English people living there. We drove through the night, not passing anyone or seeing any real kind of movement apart from long rows of automatic changing traffic lights in villages at the junctions. The first hour we stopped at every red light waiting patiently but there was nobody around and after a while the red lights became invisible. We were eating diesel from stopping and starting so it was just better to see if there was car lights or not and drive on through. I will never forget as we came coasting down a very long straight road, Ryan spotted that there was a huge meteor shower happening ahead, and it was really a beautiful sight, Benidorms lights were there in the distance, and many meteorites falling seemingly to the earth.

Thanks for reading! In the next chapter we spend some days in Benidorm, and end up leaving in a convoy heading south with some other cool people also in van.

Heres the last Episode Part 8 - "Manderines And Prostitutes"