Inevitably, on such a trip, things get broken that need fixing or discarding. Jack decided to play with the TV on its seat back mount as if it were a car steering wheel, and snapped the 12 volt power cord. It was easy enough to fix the snapped cord with a bit of electrical tape, but, alas, something else is broken and the  TV won’t work. Our cooking dinner babysitter is bust.

For some reason the door handle on the big sliding door has come loose, and it rattles. This shouldn’t have happened on such a young car, but it has. We might have coped with it on a short holiday, but we won’t be home for another seven or eight months. It needs fixing. So off we all trotted to Rioja Motor in Logrono, the local VW service centre, where we received VIP treatment and special attention. It was carefully explained to us that the door needed dismantling to find out the cause of the failure, and it might well be an internal clip that had failed, but that they didn’t have that clip in stock, and they didn’t want to spend the time disassembling then reassembling the door without the spare part – the job will take about 2 hours.

Very kindly, they have phoned ahead to a service centre in Gijon to order the part for us, so that when we pass through we can get the handle fixed there.

The hills behind our campsite are covered in wild thyme. We harvested a little and had a delicious ratatouille for dinner.