Idle Thoughts

By the end of October 2006 I was ready to make my first long trip to Spain. I had a van full of furniture, telescopes and a 2kW generator, as the power had been cut off (see article The van). There are two basic options when driving to Spain: either get the ferry to a french port and drive through France and Spain with some overnight stops, or get the ferry to Spain and drive down in one go. Despite an offer from my brother and sister-in-law, who live fulltime in France, I’d still have to make at least one other overnight stop and didn’t fancy the prospect of leaving a foreign registered van unattended in a remote carpark overnight. Especially as it contained a lot of valuable, but uninsurable (at any sensible price, anyway) astronomical gear.

So it was that I looked at ferries to Spain. There are two routes: one from Portsmouth to Bilbao and the second from Plymouth to Santander. On a map of Spain, Santander and Bilbao are fairly close to each other on the northern shore of Spain - so the destination didn’t matter too much. I would’ve preferred leaving from Portsmouth, as it’s about 100 miles closer to Marlow than Plymouth, but for some reason the ferry crossing seems to take 2 nights (36 hours) - rather than a day or less for the Santander route. Price-wise, the Bilbao ferry works out about £200 cheaper return for a van. So being closer and cheaper the Portsmouth route looks like the obvious winner, therefore I booked Plymouth-Santander.

Before I left the UK I checked the best route for driving through Spain. The websites such as Viamichelin and Multimap both calculate routes and give you driving directions through Spain. One thing you should know if you’re driving through Spain: it’s quite a mountainous country. In particular, there is a range of mountains just south of Santander, on the direct road to Madrid. On no account make the mistake I did and ask for the shortest route. It will direct you (as do the road signs coming out of Santander) straight across the mountains on the N623 towards Burgos. This is probably the worst route you could possibly take. The road is narrow with very few overtaking opportunities, so if you get stuck behind a slow-moving vehicle (of which there are many) you will be there for a long time. It is also incredibly steep with a lot of the inclines needing first or second gear. In my underpowered and overloaded van this was a real problem and a big delay for all the other GB plated white vans caught behind me. If someone was to break down, there are some stretches where getting past them would be quite hard and risky, due to blind corners and oncoming traffic. The better route is to pick up the A67 as far as Aquilar de Campoo [sic] then the N627 to Burgos. While this is 100km longer, it is largely level and about 2 hours quicker then the mountain route.

The road down to Madrid is fairly featureless, if rather long. Once I got to Madrid it was getting dark, which made it rather difficult to refer to the driving directions I had printed before setting out. This left me dependent on the directions on the road signs round the orbital motorways. I started out by looking for directions to Granada, which is a fairly major city (the capital of Granada province) that is connected to Madrid by a motorway. As I got through the maze of motorways I generally kept going south, but none of the signposts mentioned Granada. I did make one wrong turn, which put me on the road to Zaragoza. Since I had no clue where I was going I was quite grateful for a traffic jam, which meant I was stopped for long enough to get my map out and discover I was going in the wrong direction. Once I got back onto the road I had started from, I decided to just keep going south. My map showed the road I wanted as being the E5, while all the signposts only showed roads with “A” numbers. Eventually I started to pick up directions for Cordoba, which a glance at my map (more traffic jams) showed to be in the right direction. Strangely, the road was named A4, not E5. Still, it was going in the direction I wanted and I didn’t have to cut across too many lanes of slow moving traffic to get onto it. In all, it took me about 2 hours, including the diversion towards Zaragoza, to get past Madrid and onto the Cordoba A4 motorway.

My shortest route plan directed my down this road for another 250km (about 3 hours at my average speed, including a break) and then across country roads to the north of Lake Negratin, then down towards Benamaurel. This turned out to be my second mistake. While that route is a little shorter, it is very, very slow. The country roads are very twisty and often I was driving at 20mph through villages and around mountain roads.

I eventually arrived at the house just after 5 in the morning. Since I had got off the boat at 12:00 (midday) this was a 17 hour trip and took in some of the steepest roads I have ever driven. Now admittedly I did lose some time getting lost on the road to Zaragoza, and because of the delays getting to Madrid I hit the ring road at peak rush-hour. On the trip back and on subsequent visits I have stuck to the motorways and managed the drive in less than 13 hours




Made it!