After a brief trip back to snowy London, and what I would say was our most successful volunteering experience in a small farm/hostelry near the citrus-infused city of Seville, we are now officially on a road trip to bring the Robmobile back home in time for Xmas (if yule pardon the abbreviation.)
We've booked it out this time, rather than the free-wheeling, outdoors-sleeping escapade of the route down. So it's characterless Airbnb's all the way back to Paris, a five-day drive since we're taking it relatively easy. We'll do two or three hours each behind the wheel each day. That seems like enough to me. We've got nothing to prove on the "how far can you drive in a day" front.
So right now we're in Salamanca, a bustling and handsome place in the middle of Spain's seemingly completely blank western province of Extremadura. (I haven't checked this, but I like to imagine that it means "Extremely hard", since that's what life must surely be on this unrelenting sun-scorched plateau. Probably it means nothing of the sort though.)
We landed in the student area so had a fairly fun evening of beer and pinchos (for some reason they don't call them tapas here, but it's apparently the same thing) surrounded by people doing the first flush of youth business, which I always think looks rather exhausting, but at least makes for lively environs.
Back on the road today, as our schedule calls for us to wake up in San Sebastian tomorrow, then Bordeaux, then "somewhere outside Paris", a vaguely threatening term that sounds like an excerpt from the opening scene-setting of a thriller screenplay. Let's hope it all goes smoothly...
We've booked it out this time, rather than the free-wheeling, outdoors-sleeping escapade of the route down. So it's characterless Airbnb's all the way back to Paris, a five-day drive since we're taking it relatively easy. We'll do two or three hours each behind the wheel each day. That seems like enough to me. We've got nothing to prove on the "how far can you drive in a day" front.
So right now we're in Salamanca, a bustling and handsome place in the middle of Spain's seemingly completely blank western province of Extremadura. (I haven't checked this, but I like to imagine that it means "Extremely hard", since that's what life must surely be on this unrelenting sun-scorched plateau. Probably it means nothing of the sort though.)
We landed in the student area so had a fairly fun evening of beer and pinchos (for some reason they don't call them tapas here, but it's apparently the same thing) surrounded by people doing the first flush of youth business, which I always think looks rather exhausting, but at least makes for lively environs.
Back on the road today, as our schedule calls for us to wake up in San Sebastian tomorrow, then Bordeaux, then "somewhere outside Paris", a vaguely threatening term that sounds like an excerpt from the opening scene-setting of a thriller screenplay. Let's hope it all goes smoothly...
