Day 28 - What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?

Alicante to Valencia via Costa Blanca - airbnb apartment 

We headed off at 10am to start our drive north and the city was quiet, hardly surprising when the square outside our room, which looks pretty much deserted most of the time, was packed to the brim with people when we went to bed at 1am.

We decided we should take the coastal route to Valencia. Our first stop for breakfast was Benidorm, we had only been there 5 minutes when K said "can we go now, I've seen too much". The beach is lovely, incredibly long and unbelievably wide with beautiful soft, clean sand & in the distance jutting out of the water like a half sunken ship is a huge rock island. The issue was with the people the esplanade was full of oldish men walking with their tops off with these massive guts, it really makes your eyes water, who needs to see that? The bay is full of ugly, old high rise apartments, which is a shame when the beach is so nice. And there they were again, heaps of people baking in full sun, with the sun lounges turned to face the sun, cooking, roasting, burning.

Now that's a great spot for a library ... on the beach!

Next stop for lunch was Gandia. We were rather bewildered on the road to Gandia (which seemed like a normal country road, not much in the way of buildings) by coming across women in the middle of nowhere either sitting on a chair or standing by the side of the road - we wondered what they doing? A bit of googling and we found out, they were prostitutes - that explains the girl in the pink bikini and high heel shoes. We were struck at how vulnerable they were, with not a soul in sight for miles, how horribly desperate they must be.

We arrived at Gandia to find more of the same, that is ugly high rise on the foreshore & an abundance of retirees. We were beginning to wonder if we'd done the wrong thing by booking 4 nights in Valencia?

Another nice airbnb apartment in Valencia, and as Valencia is the home of paella we were looking forward to another nice one after the one we had in Granada. After checking out some reviews on Tripadvisor we headed out with great anticipation to a place very close to us. Oh the disappointment, it was woeful, Four tiny pieces of pork rib no bigger than your thumb, four thin slices of tomato on undercooked rice, and not all of the ingredients listed on the menu! Not only was it tasteless we were both still hungry afterwards .... now we are top scared/scarred to try paella in Spain again!