On the Road Again!

Today the trip is from Canfranc Estanción to Castejón de Sos. It's only around 90 miles. We backtracked to Jaca and took the opportunity to top up the diesel and for Claire to go into Carrefour.  This is where I saw the signs to the free motorhome aire! Around this area they are still working on the autovias. At Sabiñánigo we switched onto the N260.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-260_road_(Spain) The road is superb, mostly, with one section that's very narrow. On top of that we encountered the grass cutting team.  A van each end of a column with two tractors doing the work. By Ainsa we could see a parking area right by the river. We pulled in. With the dash showing 41°C it was worth €2 for an hours parking for Reggie to have a paddle in river. Next stop Castejón. A missed turn off the roundabout led to a trip around the block before getting it right. First...

It seems that I have been at this for a while now. Refining. Then having doubts about the miles to be driven. The hours in the van for us, and more importantly for a dog that's approaching his sixteenth birthday. From loving going out in the car or the van, he is now more reticent. So I have begun to look at shorter days on the road, fewer miles between stops, and chances for him to get out and stretch his legs. So far Plan G only gets us from Caravanning Oyambre on the Biscay coast to Port Vendres on the Mediterranean. Eight days to work our way across the north of Spain via Potes in the Picos de Europa.  We have been before, twice actually, but both were fleeting visits. The first in 2014 on the Triumph Explorer and again in 2024, this time in Molly our motorhome. This time I am hoping to get into the paid aire just outside the town. It's €15 a night with an additional €4 if you want electric ...

When you have too much time on your hands and easy access to the MyRouteApp app on the phone and on the laptop! By the time we are in Spain, we should have the full "off grid" system up and working. This will enable us to choose sites and aires that won't need electrical hook-up (EHU) for overnights. We can truly be free to stop where we like, when we like, the law permitting. So I have been using MyRouteApp  and a couple of apps on the phone, Search4Sites, Park4Night and TripStop, to plan a different route back. One with fewer miles and fewer stops but for longer each time. I have removed the Douro section and have built into a loop taking in Roman and Moorish sites across Spain before heading north. 

This plan is a little different. We are in Spain and subsequently France for the best part of four weeks. I don't want to be driving  everyday and mileage isn't the point. This planned route is to get an idea of the mileage from when we arrive in Santander to when we get for a possible meeting with friend's in France. None of it as far south as the Mediterranean coast. All we have to hope for is good weather.

From Ayamonte I have planned a route up through Spain to the French border.  It's only an idea. It's only rough. The chances of it happening are probably not 75%. The 2 waypoint is Tarifa.  It's a place I went to about 35 years ago! I was on the Cavalcade! The 3 waypoint is the marina at La Linea. It would give us a chance to get across to Gibraltar even for an afternoon.

Whilst I was whiling away a bit of time before the football, Oldham Athletic at home to Crewe Alexandra, was going to kick off on Sky Sports+, I was looking through the Caravan Club's European Campsites booklet for this year.  When we arrive in Santander on the long ferry from Plymouth, it will be around 1pm. If it takes as long to get out of the ferry port as it did when we arrived in Bilbao, we are looking at an hour after docking, at the earliest, before we hit the road. Bilbao is further to the east on the north coast of Spain, and we arrived early in the morning. So we had a little longer to work our way to the first site we had booked. After two nights on the ferry from Portsmouth, we were ready for a place to decompress for a few days.   Last time we stayed at Caravan Oyambre .  In the Caravan & Motorhome Club's book there are three sites around the same area. I chose this one last time as it was closer to a beach for walks th...

It might be a bit early to be planning the return for a holiday that we haven't started yet and that's a month away! But one needs to have a look at the maps and suss out places to stop that aren't too far apart, or requite driving all day and also that mean you see little or nothing of the countryside. That's why I try and avoid motorways where possible, and toll motorways in particular. Okay, you can speed along and cover long distances.  For a lot of the time you only get to see  the road stretching away in front of you and often just a bank of grass where they have tried to hide the road from view! The rough route that I have planned from Kione Playa in Alcossebre to Calais Ferry Port takes in a route we haven't done before.  Well, some of it we have but not for many years. At the moment I have planned stops at Camping-Car Park aires, although once the route is cut down to each day (from an overall route) then we can refine, and I like the idea of the France Pa...

EL CARRITO DEL AHORRO - Emergency Light V16 B | Connected Beacon with Geolocation in Spain | DGT Approved | Free Connection until 2038 | Water Resistant and Alkaline Batteries. These are for use in Spain from January 2026. It's open to debate whether they are just for Spanish registered vehicles or for us visitors as well. For the outlay of £41 it seems that having one in the van isn't that much of a chore. If we don't legally need one, it will save getting out and placing a warning triangle up the road. Plus.  This version is the new one that also has the geolocation automatically sent to the authorities. It's also a Spanish one... Seems easy enough to carry one? 

It's not something I have thought about much.  So when the email arrived from Brittany Ferries this morning announcing the Spanish routes were online, I had to go and look. It would be silly not to look!! The French routes for next year were released last week. This week it's Spain's turn. The day dragged on as we drove north to our overnight at Cresslands, see the previous blog, and so it was gone 4pm before I could take a look. I like going away in May as soon as the football season for both Arsenal and Oldham Athletic is over. It means I have basically over three months to fit a holiday in before it all starts again... Arsenal's last game for me is 17th May. I looked online, and as expected with the bookings being open for some sixteen plus hours many crossings with pet friendly cabins were already sold out! With Reggie's rabies vaccine running out on the 20th of June I needed a crossing in good time to get him his booster before it runs out. It has ...

With the dates of the French "event" firmly in the diary and the timeshare booked, I am left with 6 nights before we can check in in Alcossebre. So,I started to check a few sites that I had seen on some of the vloggers we follow. " The Slaws Adventures " went to a campsite in Northern Spain called  Càmping La Gaviota Costa Brava . It looks like a good site and is close to a dog friendly beach. The reviews on Google maps look promising.  I have enquired by email about staying there three nights so that after a drive through France we can have a few days with no worries. A dog friendly beach means that Reggie can have a play too. It's quite expensive at about £33 a night. I know some van lifers will cringe at that sort of cost. It leaves one night between the "event" and La Gaviota.  Before we cross into Spain there are quite a few Camping-Car Park aires en route. So we won't be left in a lay-by somewhere. I also have the France Passion booklet an...

I haven't made all that much progress with "Summer 2025" yet other than a channel crossing booked and one campsite for the first night booked. My attention has turned to Autumn,  October to be a little more precise. We have been invited to a special event early in the month in France and I have begun to look at the feasibility of going and including it into the holiday we normally have for our wedding anniversary.   I can't say much about the event itself until later in the year but the wedding anniversary will be our 25th - Silver Wedding! So, I have been looking at combining the two events and incorporating them into a trip to France and Spain. I have been looking on RCI ( rci.com ) to use the "banked" apartment and seeing if there are other options to Alcossebre. We have done Kione Playa Romana twice before, lastly in October 2024.  It was  a good week and meant we didn't have to travel all that far once there and could have a bit of R&R. The...

With the trip in mind I dipped into Microsoft's AI generator to get a picture of Molly in Brighton. No matter how much info I typed in, getting a true representation of Molly didn't happen. We are there two nights. Last year we went for a weekend trip staying in the Caravan Club site just up from the Marina area. This year we return to the same site but not at the entire weekend as we have advanced a day in the calendar.  The chances of us getting to park outside the pier is very remote. So AI to the rescue. The van isn't quite a Malibu but is a Ducato! The second image is more fanciful but might almost turn into a partial reality in the Autumn. 😉  Once I have worked out where we are going to go on the Summer trip I'll start to look at the Autumn trip to Spain again.  Maybe we'll give Alcossebre and the timeshare another try. Earlier in the year, October 2024,  there were so many places still open that weren't when we stayed in November ...

Today I have been looking again at the overnight stops between Calais and Alcossebre. Once again using the page map inside the front cover of the 2020 Big Easy Read Atlas of France and the 12" ruler. Towns are unlikely to have moved much in four years... Accuracy can be checked using Google Maps. Currently I have identified four stops with the last one being the municipal aire at St Cyprien Plage "Flot Bleu". Google Maps put this as 435kms to the apartment. That's the longest day but as we can't check-in until 4pm it shouldn't be a problem. So at the moment I am looking at a first stop at our old friend Camping-Car Park at Formerie. Google shows this to be around 172kms from Calais Port. To vary the route,  and also a TomTom Max suggestion, this time we are away from the N154 and N10.  The next stop looks to be around Beaulieu sur Loire. It's around 302 Kms. I looked at a few around to the south of Clermont Ferrand but there were few sites that appealed. ...

Today I have been looking at the France 2020 Atlas to work out where we can stop overnight on the way down. Does anyone else use a ruler to give a rough idea of distances? Just me? The inside cover has the overview of the whole country showing the pages. I use that to roughly work out the stops with the ruler. I have been using this atlas as well. It shows lots of Aires and campsites on the pages. It's okay and easier to handle than the bigger AA atlas. Allowing for the time when we  arrive in France plus some shopping for us and Reggie at Picard, I think that the first overnight stop might be Formerie where we have stayed before. It's about 170kms from the port. It's a small Camping-Car Park Aire with only six pitches. Each with electric hook-up. I'll probably have to reserve a pitch in advance. From there the Google Maps non-toll route goes in a familiar direction to Dreux and then diverts around Orléans and to the non-toll A77 towards Vichy and Millau on the non-toll...

I was looking on the Resort Condominiums International ( RCI.Com ) site to see if there was anything we could drive to and that was pet friendly.   I have owned a timeshare in Tenerife since 1994.  It was very cheap at the time. Of course annual maintenance goes up every year so not using it hurts!  Across Europe there were a few places but as we plan to travel in October that really ruled out Finland and Sweden, although maybe one day we can take Molly the Moho over that way. Purely as I don't know much about the weather there. There were a number of others in Austria and Hungary. One of the Hungarian places I have been before with my ex-partner. We went on our motorcycles and stayed near Heviz and Lake Balaton.  I ruled out Austria as the size of the dog was restricted to 10kg!  Reggie is around 17.5kg. It's another place I have visited quite often especially when I lived in Brno and was only 75 miles or so from Vienna. So that left three p...

My brother Neill and I stopped here in September 2022 when we were on the way to Aragón for the MotoGP.  We had come over the Somport Pass. Then station was still fenced off and the builders were still working on it. Skip forward to late May 2024. It's mostly finished. The main central portion is opened as a hotel.  The ends of the main building, that might have been storage, are still in need of major repo work. The facades are cleaned but inside they still look derelict. We checked out the aire. It's not free, and with hindsight after the terrible journey down very narrow lanes in France, we should have stayed there! Plenty of free spaces and they have electric hook-up. We did park up in the town where we could get a coffee. The same bakery/café where Neill and I went before. This time we had chocolate and churros. It was the only place open... And not dog friendly. From there we took the Somport Tunnel. It was getting too late in the day to tempt us over the Pass in a 2.8m ...

On the way from Toledo to Valencia we set the satnav to take us to the windmills. There is ample space to park and there were half a dozen vans using it as an Aire. There are no facilities although next to the information office there are loos that were locked when we were there. The windmills are of course on top of the hills around the village! There is also a castle.

Another update! I have been relying on the MyRouteApp website to plan where to go and this will tie in with the additional Navigation App when I pay for it.  For the simple A to B trips I can still use the Ohrex  as normal. Of course I am hoping that the Navigation part of MyRouteapp will work okay and it is supposed to allow the downloading of maps so that it doesn't need to use the internet to work.  I have a 30gb allowance on my mobile phone but don't want to eat that up with the navigation. At the end of the last update we were in Avila where we are staying for two days in the new aire near to the city walls. I opted for a EHU space and hopefully we can charge everything up. From here we have a decision to make. We will have 12 nights left before we return to the UK via Eurotunnel Le Shuttle at Calais. So which way back? Do we go north of Madrid or south of Madrid? I still like the idea of heading up through Aragon and taking the Somport Tunnel, with m...

Since the last update I have given up pretty much on looking for raw food for Reggie, and have concentrated on a few more overnight stops and scenic drives around the Basque and Cantabrian mountains. Distances on the map turn out to be far less when transferred into the satnav app and into the Ohrex satnav. One thing I am going to look at is using my phone in conjunction with the Navigation app that comes as an extra to the MyRouteApp that I use, and have for years, on the TomTom for bike trips. The TomTom 410 was also used in the car before we got the Nissan with the built in navigation. I have read that some people have used this app successfully on their Android tablets.  I had already booked two nights at Plays de Regatón on the coast between Bilbao and Santander. This was basically to recover from 30 hours on the ferry from Portsmouth. The plan is to try and locate a Tienda Animal store to see if they have any raw food. I have also found a motorhome parking area that should gi...