Day 8: Peguera (Ferry/Drive)

Yesterday did not end well, neither has today!

Once on the ferry to Mallorca I was hoping to sleep from soon after our Valencia departure at 10pm until immediately prior to our arrival in Palma at 5.30am. In actuality, I did not take into account the possibility that kids may also be resident in the reclining seat "sleeping lounge". The only benefit of the kids was they kept the adults awake as, once the kids eventually went to sleep at about 1am, the adults could then depart to the land of nod. Unfortunately, this meant a cacophony of snoring soon thereafter! Which kept me awake for most of what remained of the journey. All-in-all, if I had one of those fitness apps strapped to my wrist, I'd be lucky if it would have registered 40 minutes of sleep!

Never mind I thought, the park-up location I'd found on the app "Park4Night" is only 3 miles or so down the coast. Well, this would have been fine if Google Maps was able to acquire a gps signal, which it wasn't! And as the law of sods kicked in, I ended up in a convoy heading in the opposite direction to that which I wished to be going; with nowhere to stop and get my bearings until we reached Palma. Eventually, I did manage to get my bearings and a new route to the park-up. And, hopefully, sleep. A wee roundabout tour I final arrived at 6am! A 7 minute journey that took 30 minutes!

Fortunately, I was asleep shortly thereafter and awoke just before noon.

Now for today's disaster. It only took a moment of carelessness to cause damage to my van! Having paid a visit to a launderette, on leaving the nearby car park I was not conscious of the fact that I was exiting between two walls. However, as I passed through the entrance I did become conscious of the narrowness of the oneway road I was entering and the metal bollards on the opposite side of the road, which I presume are there to stop vehicles parking on the pavement. Accordingly, I started to increase the turn in to the road earlier than if the road was wider and, at the same time, I started to accelerate a little. It was at this moment that I heard some noise, including the sound of the rear driver's side wheel hub cover being removed as the rear driver's side made contact with one of the entrance walls!! All in an instance. After stopping and viewing the damage I could see that the damage was greater than simply the wheel hub having been removed! If only that was so, instead it was just collateral damage! As can be seen in the image below, there is quite extensive paintwork damage, a plastic thingy is no longer attached and there has been some indenting of the metalwork. The irony is that only a few minutes earlier I was thinking I'd had a pretty good and productive afternoon! So it goes!!

Needless to say, but nonetheless I shall, I think I've just incurred a rather large idiot tax! Yet again, so it goes.

As a final thought, I do feel as though I have recently been accumulating rather a lot of these mishaps, misfortunes, accidents and the consequences of my stupidity, which seem to be rapidly increasing as I hurtle towards my 60th birthday. What next?

Oh yes, if you know of a good car/van bodyworker and paint sprayer in the UK or Southern Spain, please send me their contact details!

• Distance driven: 15 miles
• Distance cycled: 0
• Weather: Some showers in the morning and this evening.
• Location: Google Maps