Square Peg Round Hole - Part 8 of Our Story
Wednesday, May 25, 2011 @ 7:48 PM
Packing is a nightmare! Talk about square peg round hole! We had to fit everything we now still owned into the back of a van, along with the dog and ourselves. We purchased vacuum bags to squish all our clothes and bedding into. They are a marvel and I would highly recommend them! Box after box, bag after bag, we loaded the van until you couldn’t have fitted another thing inside apart from a postage stamp. We said all our goodbyes and had farewell meals with friends. Talk about tug at your heartstrings. Anyway, the original plan had been to get the ferry to Santander and then drive the rest of the way down to Feungirola, but although there was room for us & the van on the ferry, they didn’t have any kennel space for the dog. So we had to resort to Plan B & drive all the way down through France and Spain. We purchased our Euros and made sure we had enough change for all the tolls along the way. Sitting on the ferry at Dover, waiting to head across to France, we could hardly believe it. This was it! We were on our way! However, the adrenaline and enthusiasm started to wan on the long drive through the hours of the night. At about 7 o’clock the next morning, nearly at the Pyranees we found a large parking lot with toilets and washrooms where we attempted to get some much needed sleep after being awake for over 24 hours. It really wasn’t comfortable with the three of us squashed together but we managed to doze intermittently for about an hour or so.
It was only when we got out to stretch our legs and use the facilities that we realised we had a puncture.
It was another hindsight moment for us as we had considered getting new tyres for the long journey but thought “no” we’d rather save the money. Oops! We couldn’t believe our luck or rather our lack of it. It took over two hours, lots of cursing, swearing and sweating to change that tyre. After recovering from that disaster we carried on our journey with the drive taking us through the mountains, which were breathtaking. We finally crossed over the Spanish border not long after lunchtime and found somewhere to stop & eat and practice our language skills. Not very good unfortunately. The language skills – not the food I hasten to add. We had several more stops along the journey to buy fuel, massage our numb bums & let the dog out to stretch his legs, which added a lot to the journeys time scale. The last part of the journey driving in the dark through the mountains was hair raising to say the least - but we finally pulled up in Fuengirola sometime after midnight.
