Spanish Adventure Part 1

                                                          Spanish Adventure.

Part One

We had just packed our Indian side of the family off home on the Sunday and set about packing for our journey. We were on our way to Barcelona to see our daughter Neema in a Musical. We were to drive there in the El Cid with all of Neema’s stuff that she could not take on a plane. The car was full to overflowing. The cat went into the cattery on the Tuesday morning and we went off to Bristol to stay with my brother Adrian overnight before continuing on to Plymouth to catch the ferry to Santander. We thought it best to break the journey as neither I nor Gita had done any big journeys in a car since the first lock down and were a bit a bit “rusty”. We filled up with fuel at Sainsbury’s at Plymouth and headed in to the ferry port. All going quite smoothly until at check-in we needed a Covid passport. Shock-horror the proof of vaccination was not enough. It had to be digital. I have two gripes here. The Government website gave all the either, ors but did not say that it was essential. Brittany Ferries only told us that at check-in. As a first-time foreign traveller since 2019 I had been on-line checking what was needed and no-one said that you MUST have a Covid Passport!

So sitting with one hour to go I went on line and registered ten finding out how to do it showed Gita. I hate doing things on my phone. My fingers do not work well with touch screens. I found that out when they were first introduced in 1995 where it is with laser beam or touch sensitive screens they will not work consistently because that I have trepidation about using them. It is infuriating when you touch an icon and it does nothing or something that you have not touched and I can demonstrate that time and again that modern technology fails me. People with size one fingers complain I am doing it wrong but then they are not using my size 9’s. My Covid passport arrived in minutes but Gita’s was still pending. We were waiting still as the last cars checked. This level of tension I could do without. We may not be able to travel and that would mess up all the pre-booked hotels. We had help from the check-in people who were pleasant and considerate as we waited for the Covid passport to come through. It had started to rain to match our desperate mood.  Just over the hour it came through and we checked-in. Relief there was still time as we joined the Passport queue. We had made first trauma of the holiday had been dealt with. Plain sailing now but that was not to be. Gita was seasick and wasted a complete dinner until she took some seasickness pills. Sea Legs. They are good for her and bought them in New Zealand in 2011. As we disembarked from the ferry there was a niggling rattle that was like a loose tappet but did not match the engine noises. It was not the engine.

 Pressing on we reached our first hotel 155miles south of Santander. Enjoying the sunshine and heat that we both needed and can only get from southern Europe. The overnight stop was at Valladolid in the four star Filipe IV hotel which was a great place to stay  but the car parking was in a prohibited pedestrian area and going, what seemed, the wrong way down a one way street.

We had survived day one in Spain and driving through rush hour traffic to find the hotel was an experience to be repeated a number of times as I had booked hotels as near to the centre of town with secure parking.