Donde estamos? We are driving in a little white rental car, my mom speeding with an awkward confidence around roundabouts as I attempt to read small-printed maps and Casey shouts abuse from the back. It is almost nightime, the sunlight rapidly draining from the sky and forming incredibly concrete, clearly defined silhouettes of the surrounding mountains as we try to find our way home. Every night it is different, almost as if the little house, the guadily decorated villa in the orange groves that we are renting, has moved to a different hillside. But no, the house is static, we are the ones with no apparent sense of directions, following the intermittent Spanish signage and trying to make sense of the endless roundabouts. Somehow we keep finding ourselves drifting into the vast parking area of a huge industrial estate dominated by and orange factory, and we have to wind our way back against the tide of one-way streets and finally through the little towns of Villalonga and Ador, to the villa on the hill side, in the orange groves.

But being lost, we realize is not stressful when you know you will get there soon and there is no real urgency in your travel. And being tired is not terrible when it is the sweet exhaustion of a long day of exploring towns and lying on beaches and letting the sun and the mediterranean burn your pale winter skin. And being hungry is not terrible when you have a massive iberian feast of seafood awaiting. And being in a tiny car with two people is not terrible either, not when the car is streaming along with windows open and laughter pouring almost constantly out.

Here, up in the orange groves in the hills above the various villages and the bigger town of Gandia, an hour south of Valencia and a few minutes from the beach, we are, strange as it may sound, on a vacation from our gap year. With mom, we feel part-way home, relaxed, as if whatever pressures we may experience on our travels are lifted and we are free to truly do whatever. This place we chose specifically for its off-the-map-ness, its out-of-tourist-season-ness, its mysterious-ness. It is somewhere we didn't know, but thought we might like. And we did. And our lifestyle here is decadent. We rise late, much later than any of us our used to. I go up onto the terrace where the sun is shining brightly (not truly hot, but surely bright, and stronger than anywhere we have been recently) and I dive into the freezing unheated pool. When I emerge I can swear my hair has ice in it, but the shock feels good, and I try to swim every day, for although the temperatures are not exactly balmy, it is bright and warm and the sunshine Feels so good. Then I make a breakfast, eggs and toast and fruit and a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice (not hard to find oranges here), and I sit on the steps in the sun outside the kitchen until the others join me. Then we lazily plan the day, and in moment are out of the house and bundling ourselves, and books, and towels into the little white car. And we drive off in search of something. Before properly going anywhere, we screech to a halt somewhere in the tangled roads among the orange groves and Casey and I leap out of the car and grab from the trees armfuls of Valencian oranges. Every day a different bacth until we Casey finds the best grove and after that we are set, a reliable source of small, easy-to-peel, utterly perfect sweet and delicious oranges. And then, fingers and lips dripping with orange juice and hearts fluttering slightly from the act of robbery (however small), we continue on our way. We explore beaches, where Casey adds to an impressive shell collection and mom basks in the sun and reads and I build seriously impresive and militaristically sound sand castles and swim in the cold but brilliant water of the mediterranean. And we have the Entire beach, miles and miles of white sand, entirely to ourselves. For although the weather and the water is, to us, luxurious, it is nevertheless the off-season here, and we are the only tourists for miles around. We retreat to a nearby restaurant for lunch, a brilliant affair usually featuring heavily in the seafood department as that is what we all seem to have an appetite for. Then after lunch and our favorite dessert of more oranges, we explore a town or village, the funny little shops, the open-air markets. We drive down the coast, finding more towns and beaches. Every day we have exactly One simply task, one chore to do. It is always different, but usually utterly simple, something like going to the post office or fetching something from the super market. It is refreshingly simple in fact, especially for my mom, whose days are often filled from waking till sleeping with such tasks. Now, we make a big deal of the day's task, revelling in the simplicity of our lives. In the evenings we find our way home as the sun is setting and collapse briefly, covered with sand, into the huge coaches, before leaping back up and creating an opulent meal including, again, mountains of seafood. As we sit down to eat, we have a regular trash-talk, critisizing the house that we are staying in. It is a nice house with a good location, and the outside is beautifully decorated with famously brilliant and intricate Valencian tile. But the inside is atrociously decorated, in the style of someone who perhaps comes from Colchester (amazingly, the guy who rents this villa is from a town that we went to, only 20 minutes away from Thorpe-le-Soken). The house is full of fake lace and teddy bears, cutesy little sculptures and endless fake flowers. The bathroom is a menagerie of disgustingly bright pink ceramic and frosted glass. So although it is perfectly comfortable and exactly the place that we need here in the middle of nowhere in Valencia, it has become an entertaining pre-dinner sport to critisize it abusively and describe how much joy we would take in burning away all the interior and redecorating it. After dinner we settle down to watch not one, but two or three movies. Ice cream is laden generously into bowls, cups of tea brought out and we settle in to watch a series of movies ranging from phenomenal to dreadful that we have found in our host's collection. It is absolutely the most decadent thing we could possibly do, and we all love it. And so, late-late at night, as late as we wish to stay up given that it is our vacation and we have no schedule, we drift happily to bed and look forward to another day like this.