August 14th to 16th – Power Cut in Santander

Only our third stop on this tour, and already Tracy has found "somewhere she could live". Our first choice for a place abroad was Seville, but that's now gone down the pecking order because it's way too hot and we find it hard to understand the local accent. Here in Santander, they speak a fairly understandable Spanish and it doesn't get too hot because it's on the Atlantic.

The city's main feature is its wonderful beach – a long stretch of beautiful clean sand – according to my guidebook, the beach is the 8th cleanest in Europe; and despite being a ferry town, it's actually a very pretty place, backed by rolling green countryside.

Over the past few days, Tracy has resolved to become a fully fledged hippy - she is now making her own organic yogurt and growing her own mung beans in the van. I'm looking forward to her announcing that we're going to be raising free range chickens at our next camp site.

In our time here, we did lots of cycling up and down the hills from the campsite into town, did some lovely coastal walks, ate some delicious tapas, went to the beautiful beach, swam in the warm(ish) waters, and in contrast to these aforementioned fun activities, had to deal with an extremely annoying electrical problems with our van. There was an overnight power surge which somehow managed to blow the circuits on both ours and James and Rachel's transformers, leaving both of us without lights or water. Tracy did some excellent detective work and managed to get us some power back, but the upshot is that we have to order a new transformer at a cost of £120 – very irritating!