Ho hum, the best laid plans and all that…
We’d spent some time yesterday at La Garrofa, picking through the campsite books, and pouring over the maps to work out where we wanted to go and where to stay in the Sierra Nevada. The plan was to camp first at Larroles, around 1200m up, then if that worked out and the driving wasn’t too hairy, we’d go on up to Trevalez the next day (at somewhere over 1500m).
Obviously, we should have had a backup strategy worked out for when the sat-nav gave up trying to guess which road was which, and merrily indicated that we were simply driving across open mountainside. Our hunch as to which road at the crossroads would take us to Larroles was a bad hunch. Mountain roads not being great for three-point turns, we had to keep ploughing onwards. Until the point where our road suddenly went from a doable two-lane 1:6 climb, to a single lane eye-watering ascent. At that point, there was nothing for it but to execute that three-point turn, and try another route. When we finally found somewhere to stop, we found that we’d overshot our original destination by quite a few kilometres.
Out came the maps and campsite guides, and we decided to head for Órgiva. It’s all turned out brilliantly in the end as the campsite is fantastic, with mountains on all sides, eagles soaring overhead this afternoon, a great bar and restaurant and a really nice, friendly feel to the whole place. We’d hoped to see Little Owls this evening, and while we’ve been hearing them on and off for the past hour or so, we didn’t get a peek. Maybe tomorrow.
Since it’s such a fantastic campsite, we’re staying here for tomorrow night too. There’s a half-marathon in Órgiva on Sunday, so we’ll probably move on on Saturday so we don’t get caught up in that. But tomorrow looks set to involve a walk in the mountains and a visit to Órgiva town, along with more wildlife watching and some planning for the coming days.
