French Pyrenees and NE Spain

Returning to France, we zip across the Pyrenees on the French side and spend a few days at Le Cite – the impressive, medieval, fortified town of Carcassonne with its fairytale skyline. It is touristy, and we’re glad we’re not there in peak season, but it’s pretty magnificent nonetheless. Daily there is a challenge, and this time we inadvertently attach ourselves to the French speaking tour of the city walls. A wonderful, long-winded, and thorough guide - too bad our comprehension wasn’t quite up there.

We then barrelled our way back into Spain, to the North-east Catalan region and settle for a few days in the pleasant Costa Brava town of L’Escala. Rain still hangs in the air, so we opt to buy a new tent as we can’t take another night of water torture. No rain for these few days in Spain, but we do encounter what is known locally as the ‘Tramuntana’ which is a very strong Northerly wind that whips up waves in the Bay of Roses.

Whilst back in Spain we visit Girona where we walk around the ‘Call’ which is the old Jewish quarter, visit the interesting Jewish museum, and then take a stroll on the old city walls which afford excellent views. I also quickly popped into the Museum of Cinema which was a lot of fun with it’s functioning and interactive antique exhibits such as Camera Obscura, kinetescopes, and a plethora of early film things.

We also visit Figueres and the very cool Dali Theatre-Museum, which is a work of art in its own right as it was designed by the man himself. Cool things like a beating heart locket, a Cadillac with plants inside, and Marylin’s bedroom were cool. We get a bit Dali’d out, but still decide to venture to the coastal town of Cadaques to his house at the marina. It’s too late to go inside (you have to book anyways) so we just wander around and can understand more of the backdrop that gave him such inspiration. Once you’ve seen rock and cloud formations in that area you can spot them in his work.

A sidenote is the strange sight of the prostitutes who ply their trade at the side of highways during the daytime, where they sit in their little plastic chairs at turnouts. Apparently the Pedro Amoro movie entitled ‘Bad Education’ is all about them and this region of Spain.

We leave Spain, stocking up on Cruzcampo and Spanish tortilla, and return to France, the sun to our orbit of Europe. We however made a few blunders and took our time leaving - it was almost 6pm by the time we really hit the road. Six long hours later, we almost had to sleep in the car after our target campsite’s reception was closed (at 7:30pm no less). With some random navigation and a lot of luck we stumble on to the Pezenas municipal campground, and only make it in because a bus full of kids arrived at the same time (nearing midnight). It’s strange how you can feel safer inside of a tent in the middle of nowhere – as opposed to trying to find a safe part of town at an inexpensive hotel.

Rain in Spain...

falls…everywhere it seems!

Fortunately after leaving El Canuelo we had beautiful weather in Cordoba and Seville. It was getting too hot as temperatures soared to 40 degrees, but that didn’t diminish our appreciation of the cool architecture.

In Cordoba we visited the Mezquita and walked around the old town. Then we met back up with S&S in Seville and ambled around the sights, while trying to keep cool.

Unfortunately, after leaving S&S in Carmona, the rain followed us wherever we went. Massive storms cut across all of Europe, especially Spain. We had thunder & lightning almost every night with a bit of hail thrown in for good measure. This forced us into hostels for a few nights as we couldn’t endure any more wet, sleepless nights. The tent was showing it’s age and sprung a few leaks, becoming a form of water torture. Happily, and after much deliberation, we are enjoying the new, leak-proof and very roomy tent.

From Seville, our route took us to Merida, Avila, Madrid, Toledo, Segovia, Salamanca, Valladolid, and San Sebastian.

Highlights have been the roman ruins in Merida, the art galleries of Madrid (especially Riena Sofia and Thyssen), and most importantly the excellent pinxo’s (tapas) in San Sebastian - where the rain finally seemed to stop!

Still Going

We're still on the road. Currently in Rocamadour, FR.

Just a quick note about pictures on Flickr. There's bound to be a lot of photos, so we're organizing as follows.

Looking at our Flickr sets we have:
Campsites - geotagged images from the SatNav at where we stay overnight. For these photos, click the 'map' link under the photo and you can track our progress. I hope to create some Google Maps as well, but for now, with barely any Internet access, it's the best we'll get.

For the rest, to keep it less confusing, we'll create a new 'EuroTrip' set each time we add photos then we'll number them sequentially as well as hopefully add a blog entry. So far, there are a lot of photos, and we've only managed EuroTrip 1 and EuroTrip 2 - El Canuelo

More to come, especially of places like the Alhambra de Granada, Seville, Madrid and a host of other places we've gone through.

Au revior.

El Canuelo

Most of our time is spent socialising, and everyone is having a lot of fun despite the odd car going missing when convoying around. After an initial spectacular thunderstorm, the weather has been excellent and getting nicer each day.

We get the news that Sam and Ben had little Connor on Sunday the 6th of August at 10:50pm. Way to go! A’s an uncle now.

We do some day trips like the amazing Moorish palace, the Alhambra de Granada (not to be confused with the town of Alhama de Granada), Ronda – a town with spectacular views (too bad it’s a bit touristy) and a very high viaduct. We also do little trips for hikes in and around El Canuelo like Caniello de Acietuno and Ventas de Zaffarya.

So much ham, where are all the pigs?! With everyone around, every night seemed to be a feast and everyone contributed. We had big pots of spaghetti Bolognese (thanks Garth) to Veal Lemone (thanks Michael & Trish), Sue’s gazpacho, and Jowi & Sarah’s ‘reception’ with a great array of tapas. What’s amazing is how the food turned out day after day with the very basic kitchens on hand. Sue’s birthday dinner was a hit, and we’ll all remember (patisserie) Gloria’s cakes.

We ended up staying a few extra nights after everyone had left with Dad&Sue. Next we’re off to Cordoba and Seville, then continuing northwards via Madrid.

(PS posted some more campground photos)

Started Camping

Heading down the coast from Bordeaux to Bayonne, we stay off the main highways and enjoy the scenery whilst playing around with and figuring out the SatNav. We discover that setting ‘shortest distance’ takes us through neighbourhoods that aren’t meant for the highway traffic passing through town, but it was fun to take these shortcuts.

Over the Pyrenees and the scenery changed along with place names and road signs, welcome to Spain. Pamplona was buzzing with a festival and it was great to see people spilling out of all the tapas bars and milling along the small roads where the bulls are driven during the ‘Running of the Bulls’. We stayed out near Estella with it’s beautiful architecture and marvelled at the passing walkers making their pilgrimage to Santiago.

The camping is fun, but a little taxing as we find the right groove, and we have ended up camping most of the nights. Our goal is to meet up with family at El Canuelo on the 5th, so we have set ourselves a hectic pace for driving. Even just 200km a day is more than enough when we’re on smaller roads. The large highways (autopista) are brilliant when we want to make up distance in a short time.

On the weather front, we’ve seen all sorts: with the lowest of zero degrees and snow in the mountain pass from Teruel to Cuenca, some rain, and cloudless hot days of thirty degrees in Cabo de Gata. At this stage our favourite places are the mountain ranges because they are populated with small towns, camping is easy to find, and the scenery is stunning.

From there we raced past Lorca and down to the coast and stayed in the Parque Natural Cabo de Gata – sunshine, cacti, beaches and rock formations. We were astounded by the infinite number of poly-tunnels housing tomatoes that continued from all along the coast as far as the eye could see.

Back up into the mountains to the Sierra Nevada for one of our favourite days driving. We bought some delicious Berrey olive oil in Yegen. Driving though we see the expansive olive groves below with the snow capped peaks above. Each day seems to bring a challenge, and in Orgiva we spent two hours trying to remove the wheel lock after the key wouldn’t turn and with relief made it back to our campground just before midnight! We now know the Spanish word for locksmith and steering wheel lock?!

We’ve now met family in El Canuelo and are starting an entirely different week of activity.

First Night

We had a very early morning flight. With a lot of straining and struggling, we hauled all of our gear to Gatwick and flew to Bordeaux. From all the moving, packing, repacking, and saying the last few farewell’s, we arrived in Bordeaux absolutely shattered. Our first stop was heading to the nearest Carrefour hypermarket. We quickly realise that most of the camping gear that we brought over - and paid £60 excess baggage for - is easily purchased there, and cheaper. Lesson learned. The only thing we needed to bring were sleeping bags and Thermarests.

We had big plans of driving into Spain the first day, but these were curtailed because we were far too tired to drive. We instead headed to Pyla-sur-Mer and camped beside an enormous sand dune (it looks as tall as a 10-story building). It was a nice little area with a well-equipped campground. A nice starting point for our first night, allowing us to get the rest we needed.

PS We’re going to try and post Google Maps of progress as well as some photos.

Leaving London

Although we’ve already started EuroTrip 2007 ™ we’ll go back a little to the pre-trip fun. It was a gruelling few days as we packed up and cleaned the flat. We had to pull some serious all-nighters to get through all the packing, sorting, and cleaning. In retrospect, we really needed a full week after finishing work/contracts to pack and move. As it was, we just had no sleep.

The final count of shipping was 80 cubic feet of junk (21 boxes –> 1 tv, 1 snowboard, 8 tea chests, 5 export cartons and 6 book boxes). As it turns out, once you hit 6 tea chests, it’s about £5/cu ft, so we got to the point of ‘why not’ and ‘it’ll cost more to replace it’ attitude. The main reason packing took so long is because we needed to inventory everything for insurance and customs. What really strikes home are the quantities of what you own and the cost of it all. The majority, of course, seems to be taken up by clothing.

greek cyclades

azure water
Originally uploaded by R+A World Tour.

Processing the backlog, here are (finally) some pictures from our 2005 trip to Greece and the Cyclades group of islands with Grant & Di. We started off in Athens then took a high speed hydrofoil ferry to Mykanos and visited the ancient island of Delos. From there we island hopped to Naxos, Santorini and then to Milos.

Each island had it's own charms and we enjoyed them all. Milos, where the Venus de Milo was discovered, was for sure one of the favourites of us all. Plenty of secluded and unique beaches and not at all too touristy.

Finally when we were done we headed for a few final days in Athens. We were lucky because it was a special cultural day so we gained free admission to the Acropolis as well as all the big museums. (Don't forget to check out the Athens set as well.)

There's plenty more to say but there's so much we did. Many fun days spent scooting around some of the islands on quad bikes, going snorkeling and exploring not to mention good food and nice people.

View our other Flickr sets here

venetian lamp

venetian lamp
Originally uploaded by R+A World Tour.

Aaah Venice. What a cool place. Went for the weekend with Katie & Ant and we all enjoyed ourselves. It was also the middle of the Venice Carnivale and we were treated to so many people all dressed up. It was like Halloween x 100 but without the candy.

At first we had thought that the people who dressed up would be your typical street performers and want to get paid for having their picture taken. However, it seems to be more like people dressing up just because they want to and get kudos for it. There are so many iconic pictures of Venetian costumes and it how cool would be to see your picture on the front page of a magazine.

We're trying to process a backlog of photos .. More to come :-)

View more of our Flickr Sets

snowy rose

snowy rose
Originally uploaded by R+A World Tour.

I know we still need photos and a blog from our recent trip to NZ, but much to the surprise of everyone's it snowed in London last night.