We were finally on the ferry! After 6 weeks back in Brighton and sorting various bits out, we were on our way.
We left at 9am on Saturday morning after our ferry the night before was cancelled.
Portsmouth to Santander. The journey was pretty uneventful, just long! It was roughly 30 hours at sea. Here we are on the boat.
I was slightly worried about being sea sick as it had happened to me a few years back in New Zealand crossing from South Island to North Island. We bought some acupressure wrist bands that are supposed to work by putting pressure on your P6 point which is located on your inner arm just below your wrist; this stimulates the meridian nerve which then interrupts “I’m sick” messages being sent between brain and belly. You must wear one on each wrist and they can be re used too.
Did they work? Honestly I don’t know. For most of the journey I was fine. In the evening for a few hours the boat did rock a lot, walking was difficult, a few plates got smashed and I hardly ate any of my dinner as I didn’t feel like it! BUT I wasn’t sick. Dee was fine the whole time.
Obviously I have no idea what I would have been like without the bands but very glad I wasn’t sick. Would I wear them again? Definitely and I do intend to on our next ferries
It was about 12.30pm when we arrived in Santander. We managed to find a location not very far away to pull over. Dee needed to learn how to enter Spanish addresses and postcodes into the sat nav so he played around with it whilst I made some lunch.
We did actually end up staying the night which was fine as by the time he had sorted out how to use the Sat Nav in Spain it was only an hour before sunset and we thought it would be better to wait til the next day to travel.
We would have like to have gone and seen San Sebastián but it was cold and very windy so we decided to just start making our way south. We were going to head down near the Portuguese border and then come back up the other side as we had a ferry booked from Barcelona to Italy towards the end of January.
Our first stop was at a place called Miengo in Cantabria. It looked lovely and we did get out and have a walk around but it was extremely windy. The sea was quite rough too so definitely no swimming.
We moved on, still heading South and stopped over night at Valladolid which we really liked. It was a nice little Spanish town with a square and some very tasteful Christmas decorations.
It was very Spanish, no one spoke English. We had a walk around and we managed to find a nice place to have some Spanish tapas.
And here’s our meal. The first tapas we had in Spain.
We stayed one night at Valladolid and decided to once again move further South.
We headed for Salamanca. We arrived late afternoon and in the early evening we went for a walk into town. It was quite a big town and we actually managed to get very lost! It took us ages to get back to the van. In the morning we decided just to carry on further south as the weather was still fairly cold. We didn’t get any photos from Salamanca! Probably a place to return to at some point.
The following morning we made the decision to move on rather than wander back into the centre of Salamanca.
We drove to Alacantara, on the way into Alacantara we drove over a Roman bridge it was very scary and very high up. Here it is and there was a very big drop which you can’t actually see in the photo.
The following day was Dee’s birthday and sadly he was not well most of the day. Something had made him sick, so not a good birthday for him. It wasn’t until late afternoon/early evening that he started to feel a bit better
The following morning we decided to move on and we ended up stopping for lunch at Meridian. It was a nice place to stop and have a look round. And as you can see I sat inside the “D”
There was a big Roman coliseum but we decided not to go in. I think it was about €20 each so we decided to wait until we get to Rome for a coliseum.
We had a nice walk around the town and a nice lunch. I kept saying it was Dee’s birthday lunch and in fact his birthday that day instead. 😂
It was here that we discovered wine is cheaper than water! Which could be very dangerous!
As we headed down we made an impromptu decision to cut across into Portugal and then down to The Algarve. We didn’t intend to do the whole Algarve just to head across a bit then down. It almost seemed rude not to as we were so close.
The next post will be about our “dip” into Portugal!
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Our Life on the Road 