Travel arrangements.

If you draw a straight line from Sheffield to San Juan de los Terreros through France & Spain, taking the scenic route, you can travel from Le Havre down through Limoges and Toulouse and across the mountains to Barcelona and then right down the east coast of Spain. That was our original thought, however, with the car being stolen and our trip being made in an old Peugeot, we had re-thought our journey and were now missing out the French part of the trip.

So, back to Google-maps to see what route to take from Santander. Again, drawing a straight line takes us right through Madrid, and I didn’t fancy that route for 2 reasons, firstly to do the trip in one journey would take 10 hours driving time, plus stops for me & the dogs and would mean we would be arriving quite late and secondly, I thought Madrid may add time to the journey, whilst we tried to find our way around it.

So, to make it more leisurely, we decided to do the Spanish leg of the trip over 2 days and to go across the country to Teruel, stopping overnight, and then travelling down to San Juan the following day making a 2 day journey which would be more relaxed and give us an opportunity to see more of Spain. This would give us driving time of 5-6 hours each week and with stops, it made the days much better for me and the dogs, plus Neil would get a chance to enjoy the journey, which should be more relaxing than tackling Madrid.

So, back on to Google to find hotels in Plymouth and Teruel which would allow the dogs. It’s quite easy to find them, just key in ‘pet friendly hotels’ and the place name and up pop a list of hotels or websites that only deal with pet friendly hotels. Having checked some out it was easy to book the Plymouth one, just 10 minutes from the ferry.

I selected a hotel in Teruel and but couldn’t see what the parking arrangements were so I e-mailed them, using babelfish online translation to convert my question into Spanish. This meant the answer came in Spanish and I was back to babelfish to see what they had said. Eventually, I had answers to all our questions and confirmed the booking.

So that’s the trip planned, the routes printed out and the hotels booked.

A quick look at the check list shows that tomorrows jobs are all important but boring, insurances, bank accounts, notifying utilities etc, infact all jobs that anyone moving house would have to do.