SP27 - Winter Break to Spain

Since we decided to have an earlier holiday in Europe, mostly to avoid as much of the expected heatwaves that plagued Europe this year. 

The infrastructure isn't geared up for 35°C plus temperatures for weeks on end, not here and not in Europe either.  

We booked the Picos and Pyrenees in June because the mountains are cooler.  Instead, the daily temperatures were hovering around that 35° mark all day and one day touched 41°C in one place.

So rather than "suffer" that we have returned to what we used to do, a timeshare trip in February around Claire's birthday. 

I spent a few hours looking for campsites.  It's very popular with "snow birds" from Northern Europe who stay for months at a time. Prices were also quite high! I found a couple that appealed until I saw the price for a week's stay.

So I decided to see what RCI (https://www.rci.com/) could offer.

Although I sold the timeshare (simply to get rid of it earlier in the year) the buyers were aware that the 2024 and 2025 years had been "banked" with RCI, but they could use the 2026 year onwards in December and use the apartment.

The 2024 banked year has to be used by the end of this year. But the 2025 year can be used right up until December 31st 2027.

As we don't have the constraints of needing pet friendly accommodation, I expected the search to be full of places. Wrong. 

With dates chosen to cover Claire's birthday, the search revealed two resorts in the Málaga area and four in the Valencia area.  None of the latter were that attractive. 

As usual Kione at Playa Romano in Alcossebre was there. It seems to always come up. We have been there three times before since 2022 as we had Reggie as they are dog friendly in some apartments. Last time in the autumn of 2025 the apartment was okay just not well situated! Plus in October, everything outside the town itself is closed. No restaurants or bars. Even the onsite pizzeria looked like it was mothballed months before.

So I moved the search to the two in the Málaga area. Both actually to the west in the Calahonda area. It's off the N-340 main costal road between Fuengirola and Marbella.  

It's an area we know reasonably well as we have stayed in nearby Torrenueva Park several times. Another timeshare that started off nicely and the a terrible apartment over the main reception! It's always a gamble in Europe.  The places we exchanged into in Florida and Arizona were all much better.

In the end I chose Crown Resorts at Club Marbella. It gets 4* on the reviews on RCI, and 3.8* on Tripadvisor (https://tinyurl.com/DevallTravels) 

Photo courtesy of Simon Butler on Tripadvisor.

There is plenty of car parking across the road and so I don't see any problems there. Malibu Molly is fully alarmed and has a tracker.  No doubt I will affix my "not sleeping in the van" sign in the front window again! Just in case the police or locals get nosey.  I did the same in Alcossebre!

So that's a start.  I have created a journal on Motorhome Fun that is shareable.