Tallante revisited

Off up to Murcia airport by 8am – up that lovely coast road again as far as Águilas and then managed judiciously to avoid much of the AP7 and its tolls with Emily’s help. Emily is the Satnav voice btw.
Murcía is a lovely little airport – perhaps even smaller than Granada – which is great for meeting people as no chance of missing them, parking is very handy, and so are the hire cars. We camped in the cafetéria while we waited for people and though we had thought Stella would be last in fact we had to wait for David who was nearly 3 hours late – his flight had developed a problem mid-air and had to turn back and start again.
Tallante volcano lived up to its promise and despite early starts people were keen to have a look at this example of an alkali basalt cone which is rare in this area, at around 2.5 Ma much younger than the rest of the volcanics, and has some super mantle xenoliths (the rather orangy brown splodge on the lump of basalt!).

After a fun and games finding a supermarket... there was a power cut in Turre so they wouldn't let us in and eventually we took everyone down to Mercadona in Mojacar ... we had the usual fun and games sorting people into doubles, singles and twin rooms at the villa – Fran (English speaking) didn’t turn up so we had to manage with his pa-in-law Pedro (non-English speaking) but we finally got everyone sorted out into rooms and settled them down! Luckily the power came back on eventually though there were enough 'flickers' to get everyone looking for candles.