Escaping the Spanish Floods in Our Van

The rain has been relentless here in the south of Spain, drumming against the earth and our tiny home day after day. In the brief moments between downpours I've been taking every opportunity to get outside and ground myself in nature. The forest is alive and glowing in a thousand shades of green. The leaves are heavy with water and the sound of raindrops is filling the cool air. If you're new here, hi, I'm Jessica and I live in my wooden campervan Bilbo with my partner Rissi and our adopted puppy Heidi. A year ago we left our old lives behind for a simpler life in nature, so we spent all of our savings on a second-hand van and converted it using reclaimed wood and natural materials. Since then we've been travelling around Europe in the slow lane to reconnect with nature and grow roots in the wild. The south of Spain is currently experiencing severe rain and many places are underwater, so we've been hiding away in a forest deep in the mountains, waiting for the floods to pass. This is our first time experiencing extreme weather since living on the road full-time, but we're also very grateful to have a van to keep us safe and the ability to drive away from immediate danger. Good morning friends, we had a bit of a crazy week. So we stayed in the mountains last week, as some of you may have seen, and after a few glorious sunny days we suddenly got a flood warning, a severe flood warning for our area, and we were right in the middle of the affected area, which meant that we had to basically move as fast as possible. So yeah, the south of Spain is currently really badly affected by flooding. My understanding is that it's not as bad as it was last year in Valencia, but it's pretty bad. Yeah, I mean last year was... was it last year? It was in October, I think, yeah. Yeah, it was really, really bad. Like some places are still recovering. Yeah, we visited some friends in Valencia and they told us that like the south of Valencia is still recovering from those floods and a lot of infrastructure is still not rebuilt. So knowing that, we were like really worried about the floods and then we kind of heard that someone had been swept away by a river and there was a couple in a motorhome in the area that we were planning to travel to by the beach and they had to be rescued from their motorhome because it was completely underwater and they were stuck there, which is super scary. So basically what we did is we drove away as far as possible from the affected area and we drove into the mountains near Merida, which is kind of in eastern Andalusia and we've been kind of okay here, haven't we? Yeah, I mean it's very high up and I guess water goes downhill, so that's a plus and it's got a lot of forest and forest is good at soaking up water and actually, although in the town it has looked a bit wet as soon as you leave the town where all the forest is, it's nothing, barely any sign of flooding at all. And there's entire rivers in the town. Yeah, the streets are slowly turning into rivers, so it has been quite severe. But yeah, we're fine here, so I guess we're just gonna stay here for the next week and just wait out the severe rain. But yeah, it's a bit crazy. It's like constant rain from morning to evening every day for a week. We've been in this very area last year and I think in an entire month we had maybe two hours of rain. Nothing, nothing at all. It was crazy. Yeah, that was a historic drought though, so we've gone from kind of dealing with a historic drought, which was, to be honest, easier to deal with for us, to having this extreme rain. I guess it's a product of climate change, right? Rather than having rain slowly distributed over three months, you just get three months of rain in five days. Yeah, and then because we had the droughts last year, the soil is a lot less able to soak up the rain, which makes the problem even worse. So yeah, we'll just wait it out. We'll stay parked up here in the woods because we're quite safe here. And then once the rain is over, we'll give it another couple of days and then we'll go back to the coast where we were originally hoping to go. But that area seems to be a little bit flooded, so we don't know if that's going to happen. So we'll just see how it goes. Another thing we want to do once the rain is over is film a Q&A because there were a lot of questions following our van tour and a couple of people have asked for us to do a Q&A. So I think it's time. We've been running this channel for two months, now it's probably time for a Q&A. So if you have any questions about our van or us, what else? How we do things day to day. How we do things. If you have any questions whatsoever, pop them in the comments and we'll add them to the list and record a little Q&A in the next couple of weeks. Yes. For now, it's pancake day. So we are going to have pancakes. Yeah, pancakes for breakfast. There are going to be so many. How are they? Did they pass the test? Very tasty. The chocolate syrup was a good pickup. On days like this one, we like to mirror the world around us by slowing down and giving our minds some rest. So our days have been filled with reading books, playing cozy video games and re-watching some of our comfort films. I've never been very good at napping, but this week, for the first time in many years, I managed to sleep during the day, which felt like a small kind of magic. Okay, so it's still raining, but I've been feeling really cooped up inside the van. We've barely been outside for the last five days or so. So we decided to go on a hike. We are actually in a hiking area, which is quite nice and there's lots of really lovely trails nearby. So we found a trail that kind of loops around three mountains and it's about 12 kilometres long, so we should be fine to do that before it gets dark. It rained pretty much the whole time we were out, but we felt like our bodies really needed this walk. The moody landscapes made us feel like we were walking from Mirkwood into the Misty Mountains, with towering peaks shrouded in clouds and the forest endlessly expanding into the distance. It felt like the kind of place where you wouldn't be surprised to stumble upon something enchanted. And in a way, this place does hold its share of magic. According to local folklore, a fisherman once found two children in a crystal cradle. A girl and a boy floating in a nearby river and he brought them to his wife to raise as their own. As the young children grew up, their older stepbrothers were cruel to them and the boy and girl often ran away to the riverbank, where they would feed breadcrumbs to the birds. In return, the birds taught them to speak their language. One day, the boy and girl decided to leave and seek their fortunes. When they stopped to rest along the journey, they heard birds gossiping. And one bird said that the king had married the youngest daughter of a tailor, despite heavy opposition from the nobles. One day, the king was forced to go to war and when he returned, he was told that his wife had given birth to twins who had died. He was also told that his wife, the queen, had gone mad from the loss and had to be moved into a tower in the mountains. But in reality, the twins had not really died, but were taken by the king's nobles who opposed his marriage to the tailor's daughter and they were thrown into the river in a crystal cradle, which the children recognized from the story of how the fishermen had found them. The bird went on to say that only the bird of truth could convince the king that the children were really his children. And the bird was kept in a castle by a giant who only slept for a quarter of an hour a day. Only a witch could tell the way to the castle and the bird of truth was surrounded by the birds of ill faith and only an owl could tell which one was which. Upon hearing this, the siblings went to the city where a dove directed them to go with the wind and by following it, they reached the witch's tower where the witch showed them the way to the giant's castle. Once they arrived at the castle, they heard the owl's cry and asked it for advice. The owl told them to ignore the brightly colored birds and find the white bird in a quiet corner of the castle. They had a quarter of an hour to do the task but they succeeded. The nobles who were responsible for abandoning the children tried to prevent the king from learning about them but when the bird of truth flew to him, he listened. The king at once went to embrace his children and then all three of them freed his wife, their mother, from the tower. The wicked nobles lost their heads in punishment and the fisherman and his wife who had raised them were given many riches. Good morning. We've been in this forest for over a week now and we're getting really antsy to leave. The rain has finally eased off. We're still getting the occasional drizzle and it's still very gloomy as you can probably tell. So I think it's safe for us to leave this place. I think the national park rangers are also very tired of seeing us so it's definitely time. We don't really know where we're going to go next. Our initial plan was to go down to the coast but that area may well be flooded now. So I think we'll just slowly drive there and see what the situation is and if it doesn't work out we'll just see where the wind carries us. So I guess we'll find out soon and you will find out next week. If you enjoyed this video make sure to leave it a thumbs up and if you haven't yet do subscribe for more van life adventures slow living on the road and the folklore we encounter on our travels. And if you have any questions for our Q&A make sure to leave those in the comments as well. We hope you have a lovely week ahead and we'll see you next time. Take care, bye.