Reanna read it
A Journey and a Half : I’m never doing this again.
I’ve been driving back and forth between Spain and the midlands for a couple of years and done enough on my own to manage. Usually.
I left in the rain. I got to the eurotunnel in the rain. I crossed France in the rain and my task this trip was to avoid each and every toll possible which made rural France take a little longer than usual. I’d set myself the target of a hotel room booked at the last minute as I was fed up with arriving in Orleans in the middle of the night to find everywhere affordable full (but that’s another story) and I was heading for somewhere just the other side of Clermont-bloody-Ferand. The hyphenated bit was invented a few trips back and I will not digress to explain just now.
A few poxy wet miles short, I hear a bang and realise my offside rear tyre has just burst. I imagine I am lucky not to skid and manage to halt on the side of this deserted French motorway in the dark and the rain. Safety vest on, warning triangle out. It falls to pieces so I prop it up. I phone the RAC who say I have to phone the French lot, who say I have to notify the motorway breakdown people and all this after I get someone who speaks emergency breakdown English. My rusty French does not extend to “burst tyre” and the nearest I can get to “bugger” is “merde” which is not the same thing at all. I can’t see any marker posts because they are in the middle of the central reservation I discover later. Meanwhile a breakdown truck arrives, looks, talks to the lot on the phone, tells me to stay out of the van and away from the vehicle and then clears off leaving me on the verge. Well, this will add to the tales of intrepid travelling, and that was just the start,
Along comes the proper tow truck but since my van is almost certainly overloaded I am at pains to explain it is VERY HEAVY before he pulls the towing hook right off it. He takes me to a garage, in a village I can’t find on the map now, and puts the van in the forecourt. They can do nothing til morning, do I want him to take me to a hotel? Not unless it’s the one I’ve bloody well paid for and can’t get a refund, I think bitterly, I’m on a tight budget which doesn’t allow for this. Can I sleep in the van? Yes certainly, here is the loo and there is an armchair etc, I will make you a coffee. Thankyou, thankyou. It is now after 11pm and I make myself comfortable though a little damp in the front of the van. This is not working too well, and it's still raining.
In the morning the yard slowly fills with workers and the boss, who is solicitous but sorry he cannot find a tyre to match mine, so he will have to get a pair. Bugger. In France, they will not permit a non matching pair, so even if I had my spare they would not put it on for me. Much phoning to and fro the RAC to try to arrange something but to no avail. At the point at which the nice man comes to tell me apologetically that he can get me two Michelin tyres (I bet he can – Clermont-bloody-Ferand has the biggest Michelin factory in the world or it looks like it, it takes up half the town) but they will be over 300 euros; self pity sets in and I snivel quietly in the front of the van. I’ve already SOS texted my only friend who might be able to fund this as well as to sympathise with my predicament but he isn’t answering. The nice young man who towed me in is concerned, what’s wrong, you are crying? Yes, I haven’t enough for tyres at 300 euros! He tells the boss and they start again, maybe we can find something cheaper, eventually all is arranged but it will not be til later on……….but they feel sorry for me alone and with so far to go when I tell them where I am headed, so I get away sooner than they said, with two matching tyres – not Michelin – for just over 200 euros, because I can just about manage that but now have no money for fuel unless my friend reads his texts soon. Back on the road. Some hours to make up if I am to stay on schedule, maybe 8. And it didn’t stop raining til nearly Perpignan.
By 9.30pm I am knackered and going through Barcelona ready for an overnight stop. Funds available as kind friend has put some money in my bank. American clover leaf junctions have a pattern and a logic which doesn’t change. The Spanish have a version which may or may not allow you to come off a motorway and go in any of the other directions. But don’t count on it. I got lost in Barcelona attempting to reach a hotel in clear sight of the exit, crossed to it on the overpass, had to guess which branch to take (3 and no sign of course) and found myself going one way back parallel to the same motorway - and not into the hotel car park. You’d think the previous junction would be a good place to change sides and get back on wouldn’t you? But no, the overpass went plenty of places but not back onto the motorway the other side. I gave up in the end and went somewhere completely different. Another suburb of Barcelona and a different motorway. Result, hotel by motorway exit an hour and a half later, where no confusion over which road to take, food, shower, bed. I earmark this one for future journeys, convenient and nice and has a swimming pool should I ever arrive before dark. If I digress to add I spent two hours looking for it on another trip before giving up, you’d wonder how I ever manage 3 days on my own, but I do, apart from the odd incident.
En route UK back to Spain, I’d agreed with a friend to pick up some car parts for him which he’d bought on ebay. If you are driving your own UK vehicle take into account that km are not miles. This matters when you print out instructions to somewhere in the middle of Valencia and whilst trying to match visual input to the instructions, also note the distance from one to the next. Except that the road you thought sounded like the one in the instructions, but it wasn’t 5.6 miles yet so it couldn’t be, blooming well was because it is KM not MILES you needed to count, and what does your MILEOMETER register then……and by the time you’ve realised all this you are 10 miles away and hopelessly lost in a big city.
The phone conversation went like this “where are you”- “in Valencia, lost” “can you pull over”- “no” “can you see any landmarks”- “no””can you turn round”- “no”. When I find somewhere (quite by accident) near a river, a park and a whopping great hotel with a name on top AND just the one parking space, I nab it quick and we start again. This time the guy comes to find me on his moped and I follow him back to collect the parts. He very thoughtfully chaperones me back to the motorway. I can’t imagine why he though I wouldn’t find it otherwise………Now all of this was planned before I burst the tyre and spent the night in the van losing time and now a bit more getting lost in Barcelona and then Valencia, so when I leave the latter I am determined to get going in order to make it home by night.
But the weather changes. Great roiling storm clouds over the mountains above Alicante, and into the storm I drive. What a stinker, the visibility is a couple of car lengths and still everyone overtakes. Not me thanks, I’m looking for the first opportunity to pull off which predictably means no rest stops for miles. (Or even kms) Finally I turn into the services thinking surely everyone will be in here and no room, but no, they are running in and out of their cars and DRIVING OFF meanwhile the rain beats on the roof the thunder crashes right overhead and the sky is cleft by massive streaks of lightning. The wipers on full barely touch the downpour. And I wait for an hour and it hasn’t let up. Resignedly I recalculate I may get home about 11 or 11.30 now and it started out being the morning of the same day!
Well it slowed enough to get going, just about, and it cleared, and the sun came out and I put my foot down, and the the traffic started slowing a bit and there were big puddles in the fields and water in a street up to the kerb top. Then the puddles were the fields and then there were no fields only water and it was hard to see where the fields should be. A greenhouse half full of water. A road sign with the bottom half submerged. Well, it had rained very hard. The motorway to Almeria is closed, said the signs, well fine, I’m going on to Granada anyway.
No, I’m not, because the floods are getting worse and the motorway is closed full stop as is the branch off to Almeria and we are sent off who knows where. For something like 3 hours I bumbled around along with just about everyone else trying to find somewhere to go other than back to Murcia where the road wasn’t shut or diverted somewhere along the way. There was no alternative route to divert to, Bits of everything which was open to start with turned to flooded and damaged and diverted bits. Driving round in circles about described it. In those 3 hours I think I covered maybe 20 miles. Amazing they had managed so many road closures given the scale of the flooding. I passed a raging torrent as wide as a motorway with muddy waves peaking feet high where there should be a “rambla”, a trickle or a stream at best, and I shuddered to think what happened to anyone in the way. My fully loaded van would be no match let alone a little car. Or person. Or animal. Oh dear. I’d long decided to give up trying to get home and to stay the night wherever I could. There was always the danger that to stop was to wait to be hit by floodwater too. But just like a rest stop when you need one, not a hotel, hostal or anything to be seen.Head for the coast and follow it? Fine until the road was closed or went inland again, and that was after taking more than an hour to even see the coast. In the dark and in unknown territory which did not correspond to anything on my map, given I had no idea where I was anyway, I finally rounded a bend to the sight of a Venta. Yes!!!! I got the last room, I think, and never has a shower, a glass of wine and some tapas been so welcome. 17 euros for the room and in the event only about 20 mins short of Almeria.
In the morning I see on the internet that Murcia and Almeria have suffered mightily and so has further west but Nerja seems ok. 9 people have lost their lives. I’m very thankful to be safe and simply facing the prospect of the coastal route through Almeria (which I dislike heartily for its speed and dangerous course). I met two English guys who had come from Murcia in daylight and seen what I had missed in the contraflow on one bit of motorway still open - a big chunk of road missing. I set off for Nerja, glad to be in one piece, just that horrible road from Almeria to get past now, another hour and a half……
And so, I arrived back in Nerja a whole day late but glad to be alive and threatening never to do that journey again.
But of course I did………