From Cadiz to Paris and back. (Part One)

Good morning! This trip is the one that mainly encouraged me to start writing a blog, in my three decades of life I have made several trips, but none with as much scope and importance as this one that I am going to tell you about here. I did it just a year ago, I will try to give all the details and data of interest possible in the form of a logbook, although I have no doubt that I will miss moments and situations that on the other hand can only be told by living it in situ. I hope you like it and relive it with me, as I will do next.
My journey-Odyssey. I gave it this second name referring to the work of one of my favorite classical authors, Homer’s Odyssey, whose story tells the adventures and adventures of the Greek hero Ulysses or Odysseus on his journey back to his homeland Ithaca once the Trojan War was over, and how I am similar to this heroic lord, because like him, I was finishing a war chapter of my life and I ventured on a journey back home, to my homeland, to my home. The use in current colloquial language of the word “odyssey” as defined by the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language would be: “Long journey, in which adverse and favorable adventures abound for the traveler”, and in its second meaning of the term: “Succession of adventures, usually unpleasant, that happen to someone.” Well, my trip was relatively long, from October 15 to 21, 2016, less than a week, and there were many adventures, both adverse and favorable, and as for the adventures lived, contrary to their definition, they were generally pleasant and wonderful, a six-day trip full of discoveries of landscapes, places, cities and people of the most disparate, and of course always enjoying the road, do not forget, as I always say, I do not know if I have plagiarized it from someone, at first it occurred to me spontaneously one day and I always repeat it: “Do not wait to reach the destination, life is the way.” I have gotten very involved with terminology, professional deformation of philologist. Let’s get started, then.


We made the journey in a red five-door stroller, a common utility vehicle with more than ten years of use, my partner and I, I have to thank my partner who was the driver all the way and who took me months to convince to go on this crazy journey, as if it were a master’s thesis. As the image at the top indicates, the itinerary I followed on the way out was as follows, from Spain to France: San Fernando de Cádiz > Mérida > Salamanca > Donostia – San Sebastián > Bordeaux > Rennes > Le Mont-Saint-Michel > Paris > Magny-Le-Hongre. And back, from France to Spain: Magny-Le-hongre > Lyon >Barcelona > Utiel (Valencia) > Despeñaperros > San Fernando de Cádiz. All these marked points are stops that we made on the way, sometimes to eat and sometimes to spend the night, I will detail au fur et à mesure. Without further ado, let’s start the adventure:

DAY 1: Saturday, October 15, 2016.


We left San Fernando, in Cádiz, province of the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, on Saturday, October 15, 2016 at 5:00 in the morning, towards Seville on the highway, we left at night and its wonderful road landscape populated by native vegetation was changing as the Sun made its appearance wishing us a good trip. The daytime temperature was around 25º – 30º C at that point of the journey, something usual at that time of year in that area of the planet. I don’t consider myself a particularly religious person, but in extreme cases I always like to carry a rosary with me just in case, although I have to say that this rosary was already in my partner’s car forever, don’t hang the label of blessed from the beginning, “please-thank you”. (humorous tone)

At the height of Seville, we enter by the Ruta de la Plata highway that goes from Seville to Salamanca, an ancient Roman road that articulated the west of the Iberian Peninsula, whose history is how much less interesting, I leave you here the link (http://www.rutadelaplata.com/es) to the website of the Ruta de la Plata for those who want to know more about the subject.

About two and a half hours later we arrived in Mérida, AUGUSTA EMERITA, in the province of Badajoz and capital of the autonomous community of Extremadura, whose motto is “Submitit Cui Tota Suos Hispania Fasces” (Which subjects all of Hispania to its fasces), so we decided to submit and stopped for breakfast in a bar-restaurant about twenty meters right in front of the entrance of the Roman monumental complex, which we could not enter because it was still closed when we arrived, but we took a walk of just over half an hour through the old town of the city and we could see some Roman ruins that were hidden behind its streets, you turned a corner and boom you ran into an Ionic or Corinthian column, I don’t really remember the architectural style, and its bridge overlooks the river with its quais full of beautiful trees.
We follow the path of the Ruta de la Plata to its last connecting city, another two and a half hours later: Salamanca, the capital of the autonomous community of Castilla y León, Alfonso XIII described it as “very loyal, very noble, charitable and hospitable”, and later it was described as “very cultured, learned and wise” by the Junta de Castilla y León, and finally in 1988 the so-called Old City, the old town, was recognized as a World Heritage Site by the UN. Well, all of the above is true, it is home to one of the most famous university cities in the world today, and we were also very kindly welcomed by its people, all very friendly, we spent approximately two hours walking through the old town, there were weddings in its churches and the mosaics on the floor of the alleys were full of papers with hearts and euro bills.

We stopped for a snack for lunch that pleasantly surprised us when we realized when they brought us the bill from a bar-restaurant in the Plaza Mayor that they had only charged us for the drink and all the tapas we had ordered were included in the final price. So with what we had saved on food, we went to buy black pudding rice, which is very famous in this part of Spain, to take it as a souvenir to the family (it was delicious by the way). Around four in the afternoon we continued up the peninsula towards the Basque Country where we arrived at about ten o’clock at night, with a half-hour stop on the outskirts of Burgos to drink, my partner and I, a coffee and tea respectively at a roadside gas station, check the tires, gasoline, etc. very important on such long trips.



I remember that as we approached the Basque Country, the day began to cloud and sparkle and it was cold, as if it were the film Bienvenue Chez Les Ch’tis or in its Spanish version the film Ocho Apellidos Vascos. I was very amused that it happened to happen. Despite the weather, I was very happy to have crossed Spain in one day stopping in so many places and seeing so many things, in addition to the fact that the Basque landscapes are very beautiful, especially the small villages in the countryside, I also remember that it was already dark when we passed many tunnels and mountains with sinuous curves that allowed us to see within small valleys some small villages golden by artificial lighting, Beautiful photography. And when I went down all those mountains, I was in the province of Guipuzcua, the region of San Sebastían or Donostia in Basque as I prefer to call it.
It took us an hour to find parking, finally we put it in a parking lot that cost us 35 € all night, very expensive, but it was impossible to autrement. Even bursting as I was from the trip, my great gift of sense of direction led us in a few minutes to the pension where we spent the night in the center of the old town of the city, there was a lot of atmosphere since it is Saturday in the South as in the North, so we went down from the pension right to the street where it was to have some “pinxos” for dinner that tasted like glory, I don’t know if it was because of hunger or tiredness or because they are really delicious or because of everything together. We took a walk to get down all those pinxos of salad, octopus, seafood and assorted fried foods, and we went to sleep around one in the morning.