Monday 16 March 2020 – Algeciras to El Real de la Jara

An earlyish start to a cool dull morning with a strong breeze. Over breakfast we consulted the various news sources to find the chaos over Coronavirus escalating, encouraging us to cut short our plans and get on up the road. Some things were, however, non-negotiable and after breakfast we went over to Carrefour just after it had opened and got ourselves stocked up. Wanting a few other items we then drove over to Mercadonna to find a queue outside – our needs were not important enough so we dropped that idea, as well as the washing expedition, and headed for the aire at Castellar de la Frontera to see to the van.

That plan was thwarted too, though, as the police had the village blocked off and turned us away; we know not why, maybe the French had invaded and it was full or the town council had just decided to close it down. So that'll have to wait and we thus headed back to the motorway to start our trip homewards, pausing at the fuel station at Los Barrios to top up the gas bottles – at least they were open but very much in “night service” mode. No access to the shop and the staff all wearing masks, as were all the staff at Carrefour incidentally.

From there it was back on the road, which was very very quiet. From what we'd gleaned all the roads were open but the gantry signs all had the message that travel without justification was prohibited. We were passed by a couple of police patrols but there did not seem to be any checks being made – or maybe they saw a UK registered vehicle heading north as justifiable. Hopefully this won't change for at least the few days it'll take us to get clear of Spain.

We've decided to go up the western side of the country using motorways all the way and only stopping for rest. We paused for lunch just short of Seville at a service area and identified a couple of small quiet aires where hopefully nobody would take any notice of us and we could also service the van properly. So after negotiating a surprisingly busy Seville we thankfully arrived at El Real de la Jara, a small town with an out-of-the way aire with services and, apart from an empty caravan, nobody on it.

Having serviced the van, dropping the cassette cap straight down the disposal (grrr, but we have a spare) then Terry dropping his smartphone and smashing the screen (it's still usable though), we took the decision to call it a day here – it was gone 4.30 pm – and try for an early start tomorrow to get as far as we can. We've managed 177 miles today which, considering all our errands this morning, we're quite happy with.

But now it's raining and gone very cool.

From now on, the blog is really only going to be a report of how we're getting on. We'll keep it up but might not be posting every day. Thanks for viewing it.