We had left – it was going dark and battering down. It was getting towards rush hour and here was me driving an unknown vehicle, huge and with the steering wheel on the wrong side, down the motorway following an american pickup.
Made it to Warrington without any incidents and loaded up. My friend took her seat in the front and we set off. Still raining and now dark and full rush hour down the M6.
We had booked the early morning ferry from Dover to Calais so were making good time. There were no travel restrictions or tests required for travelling overland to Spain – the rules only applied to air or sea. We had not been able to find out about travelling through France. I had called the British Embassy in France, the French Embassy in UK and various other official bodies and not managed to find out if travelling through France when you were homeless was allowed.
The journey down went well – although slow because of my nervousness and the atrocious weather. We had a wee stop for the dogs and arrived in Dover in good time for our ferry. The ferry company had stipulated no more than 4 pets in a vehicle so we were planning to move 2 of them into the pickup for the crossing. Luckily no-one checked or asked, and no-one asked to see the pet passports. We caught a slightly earlier ferry which was late and tried to get our head down on the journey for half an hour. Driving on and off the ferry was not as bad as I had anticipated.
Once in France we continued to follow the directions from Waze. We drove for around 3 hours, let the dogs out (and the cats around the campervan) and had a quick snooze in the front seats before heading off again. We did this repeatedly all the way down.
All the way to Southern Spain we had rain, sleet, snow, strong winds – apparently the worst weather in France and Northern Spain for ages – just our luck. At least I was getting used to the size of the campervan although overtaking lorries with the spray and the poor lane markings was scary. The UK is so lucky to have bright white lane dividers and cats eyes – it is times like this that you miss them.
The route we took led us through the outskirts of Paris (again hitting it at rush hour), Orleans, Poitiers, Bordeaux, Burgos, Madrid, Granada and eventually Competa. My friend had made a load of barm cakes so we mainly ate these with a top up of lattes and chocolate. We stopped for a takeway meal as we neared our destination as we had exhausted our supplies.
As if the journey had not been enough hard work for me, we then had to get up the mountains from Torrox to Competa. Again in the pitch black we had to weave round narrow (for a huge campervan and inexperienced driver) winding country lanes that hugged the mountain, with steep drops down the cliffs. All I kept saying to my friend was ‘are we there yet’ – I had full sympathy with kids who say it on car journeys.
Finally we arrived – in the early hours of the morning. Luckily the owner had let the keys under a rock and left a few lights on for us. We unloaded the animals and essentials and although we had gone from Thursday to what was now early Sunday morning, we had passed the point of needing sleep. The villa has an enormous garage and compound for parking so my partner moved the campervan round to it – I could not face getting back in it and driving again – least of all reversing up the lane. I had managed to get it all the way without so much as a scratch and as he pulled into the compound with the dip at the entrance and the weight in the van, it bashed the plastic skirting near the back which cracked. There goes our insurance excess we thought ….