The most important thing for us to do today was to visit the Feria Valencia Exhibition Centre to collect our race numbers for tomorrow. It had not been the best night of sleep with the tapas restaurant noise finishing around midnight, and then being awoken again around 04:00 when someone arrived next-door. It seemed likely many of the apartments in this building were for short-term holiday lets like this one.

With the exception of the mandatory expo visit, I wasn’t sure where our legs would take us today, other than knowing we should try to keep time on feet to a minimum. So after breakfast we started off by heading in the direction of the LEGO store, but found the queue too long. Getting our LEGO passport stamp would have to wait either until later, or another day.

Now heading to the Valencia north train station, València-Estació del Nord, we passed the Plaza de Toros once again, and got photos of this during daylight for the first time. It would probably be one of the places we’d pass the most over the coming days. Inside the train station there is a room full of mosaics, we got our photos quickly before a tour group went in the room to be told about them.

For getting to the expo, handily identified as Expo 21K on Google Maps all year round, we needed to take the metro. We tried the ticket machines in the train station first, but found these were for overground trains only. Carmen then led us around the block to Plaza Espanya where we got on the metro for a few stops until we changed to tram 4 to continue the journey. It was a long wait for the tram, and on the other side it was about a twenty minute walk to the exhibition centre, as few trams take the branch of the line it is on.

For the journey we bought a SUMA T3+ ticket for 72 hours for €8.70 that covers the metro, trams, and busses. We’d realised we’d be using the ticket for getting to and from the expo, to and from the race start, and potentially would need it for sightseeing on Monday as well. Although we’d only be in zone A, the 24/48/72 hour tickets are only available for covering two zones. Single tickets for just zone A would have cost us €1.50 a journey, and just two journeys a day for the next few days would have cost more than what we just paid.

Feria Valencia is an impressive array of buildings in an area that feels quite remote. In some ways the scenery of mountains around it reminded me of South America. An unfortunate part of the history here was that almost a year ago it had become a temporary morgue for the victims of the 2024 DANA floods in this region. DANA is short for Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos, which in English means ‘Isolated Depression at High Levels’, which is more commonly known as a cold drop. This is something Spain and France use to refer to when there are large amounts of rainfall during the autumn months. The one in 2024 had been devastating causing loss of lives, and a lot of damage to the province. Today, there didn’t seem to be signs of any of it.

One of the first things you see are the large ‘FERIA VALENCIA’ letters which are reminiscent of the sort of place name signs you now see in many popular tourist cities. We walked across the plaza to a large glass building, and then down two escalators (that are carefully crowd controlled), to the exhibition hall where we joined our respective queues for collecting our race numbers. This required me to show the QR code, and then my passport. I took a little longer than Carmen, and by the time I was collecting my t-shirt, she was answering a survey. They told us that most sights tend to be €2-3 each, which tallied with my research, so that was positive.

We got our Super Half passports stamped quickly enough, and got a race bib saying ’My Fourth Super Half’ before joining a queue to get a photo in front of their sign as we have done with each of their events. This queue actually took a lot longer than collecting our race number and t-shirt had!

The flow of the event is such that there’s a specific order to it, and you have to walk past every single stand in order to leave the exhibition hall. Cunning. Carmen got a running vest, and some hydration tablets before we found our way out, and to the nearest tram stop. This stop had fewer trams arriving, but it meant less time on feet, so was worth waiting. It gave us chance to look through what we’d been given in the pre-race goodie bag. We both had a bag of potatoes, rice cakes, protein bread sticks, mixed nuts, hot chocolate powder, long-life milk, and a few other smaller bits and pieces that I binned. I would have rather the bits I didn’t want go to someone else, but didn’t really have the chance.

The tram took us to Empale where we switched to the metro, and then two trains later we reached Mercat de Colón. I thought this area would be a good place to find something for lunch. The market is mostly a metal structure with brickwork, and ceramics on either end. It was designed by Francisco Mora Berenguer between 1914 and 198, and is an example of Valencian art nouveau.

It was busy as you’d expect, and filled with tourists. We hesitated about going in, but decided even if the food in there was expensive it’d be worth taking a few photos and browsing. We didn’t get far before we stopped at a Horchata Daniel for lunch. Horchata is the local tiger nut milk drink, but many places have it in their name to indicate it's something they sell.

We decided our midday meal would be a tasting platter of cakes. It was a nice selection that was just filling enough, and only one of them was particularly sweet. They described the selection as mini versions of their products: 1 Toasted Horchata Cream Tartlet, 2 Danielets, 1 Tiger Nut and Chocolate Coqueta, 1 Chocotet, 1 Ametla Pastisset, 1 Tronquet, and 1 Mocadoret.

We then completed our walk around the market, noticing that one place sold different types of paella, and didn’t seem to need preordering as we’d been warned previously we'd need to. Our meandering walk from there took us past a church, and close to the City Hall before we found a souvenir shop where we both bought a fridge magnet. We then finally made it to the LEGO store to get our passports stamped.

Our journey back took us past a supermarket, but they didn’t have anything suitable for breakfast, so we bought an ice cream instead, and went back to the apartment to relax for a while in the air conditioned room. Yesterday had reached 30C, and today didn’t seem that much cooler.

Whilst casually browsing, we found that news reports for the area mentioned a protest march in the city of Valencia. It seems we’d completely missed this whilst out.

Tens of thousands of people demonstrated in the eastern Spanish city of Valencia on Saturday and called for conservative regional leader Carlos Mazon to resign over his handling of flash floods that killed 229 people a year ago.

Displaying banners with messages such as "Mazon to prison" and chanting, "They didn't die, they were murdered," protesters filled the centre of Valencia for the 12th time since the flash floods occurred almost exactly one year ago.

Source: Reuters

From the balcony of the apartment I couldn’t hear anything that suggested it was nearby. Available information suggested they’d marched to the Plaça de la Verge in protest of their current leaderships handling of the tragic floods almost one year ago, so were nowhere near us.

Eventually we headed back out to Lidl. We found everything there we needed for the next few days. I then cooked us a pasta dish of mixed tortelloni (some large porcini mushroom ones, and some smaller prosciutto ones) that I’m sure could have easily served three people. Once we’d got our race kit ready, it was then time to wait patiently for race day to arrive…