Barnsley to Benidorm - or bust! (It's the journey, not the destination)

Member Name: apuskiduski

Product:	It's the journey, not the destination
Date:	30/05/09 (168 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheaper and greener than flying. The stunning landscape. Personal growth.

Disadvantages: Long, dull, boring at times and could become an endurance test.

For those of you that have read some of my more recent reviews you may know that I enjoyed an epic journey from Barnsley to Benidorm (and back) by car this Easter with nine other family members, in two cars.

I suggested the title of journeys to Dooyoo almost as soon as I returned and now that I've finally got the category started-not particularly the title I would have chosen- I'm hoping that I've opened the floodgates to some extremely entertaining tales of adventure, endurance or just sheer extravagance that we can all get our teeth into.

I really wanted to write about my experience because I found the whole journey to be something of a learning curve. It was only 48 hours or so each way, which is nothing in the grand scheme of things but I learnt new stuff about my family, myself - particularly as a navigator - and my fellow Europeans that I wouldn't have if I'd sat on the sofa and watched telly all weekend - certainly if 'Britain's Got Talent' had been on!!

So here goes! I hope I don't bore the pants off you - you can always skim through the headings and read the bits you fancy I suppose, I'll wake you up in about ten minutes!

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1. Road signs look different in the dark.
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We had rehearsed the journey like we were doing the Italian Job, everything was set, watches were synchronised between the two vehicles and phones were fully charged. But, somehow as we drove off the ferry at Dunkirk, at 5.15am, in the pitch black, the roads didn't ring any bells with my dad (who'd done the journey three times in the past by the way) and my mum's fab advice was just to "follow that lot, we did last time and that seemed to work". So we did.

It was only about twenty minutes later we realised that all the cars had Polish number plates and were heading in the wrong direction. Totally! This added an hour to our journey time plus the stress of finding our way back to the A1 signs.

Lesson learnt: Follow signs, not Poles, when you get off the ferry.

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2. Paris Peripherique promotes panic - apart from the professional driver types!
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On several occasions around Paris I thought I was being towed by the vehicle in front. On several others I thought that we were towing someone else. Either way I realised that the French, particularly those in the Paris area, want to be "close to you". We even played it on the CD to try to have a laugh about it! My dad has a strange set of CDs ranging from the Carpenters to the Dubliners: A vast array of tunes for any travelling circumstance. My mum plays him "Seven Drunken Nights" to remind him to leave the car in the garage!

When we left the Peripherique I was quite proud of the fact that I'd 'got through it' without panicking too much - my dad only had to speak to me harshly once after I took an obviously sharp intake of breath and retorted "Bloody 'ell Angela do you think I can't drive? I'm a bloody professional for Pete's sake!!" Enough said I thought. Then my mum pipes up from the back. "Bill, you're retired, and if you don't slow down I'm never stepping foot in a car with you again!" She obviously hadn't noticed the 12,567 other drivers taking part in the Paris Grand Prix. But, never mind - a full scale domestic on the Paris ring road could only add to the drama.

So, half an hour later, when they'd both chipped in their final twopenneth, imagine my disappointment when I discovered I hadn't been around the Paris Peripherique at all, only the Peripherique Exterior. I can't imagine the madness that the true version would entail; I would definitely have needed valium for that one! My mum as well. There were two kids in the car with us who slept right through the whole escapade.

Lesson learnt: Do the Peripherique at night and when everyone in Paris has gone on holiday!

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3. Tiredness kills. Tiredness can also kill tyres!
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We were knackered by the time we got round Paris. So we had the first of our "I'll have to stop or I'll crash" stops. We pulled up at the side of an "Aire" and tried to get our heads down for a while. Well, I say we, I had to swap seats with my dad as it's impossible for someone 6'2" to sleep behind the wheel of a Shogun, comfortably. OK, so you might just be able to nod off on a really long straight run but you can't have a deep power nap.

Imagine my dad then with his feet all over the dash board and the seat reclined trying to get some shut eye when we hear this almighty thud just off to our right, loud enough to wake most of the Members of the House of Lords!

A silly French woman had driven her car over the first row of anti terrorist concrete blocks in a row of two, trapping her front left wheel between the said blocks. How she had succeeded in doing this I do not know. In exhausted tuneless unison we all agreed "She's over tired!"

Unfortunately, I never slept with all the excitement and I actually got out to see what this woman could have been thinking to do it. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. She was definitely asleep!

Lesson learnt: Sleeping whilst driving can be dangerous!
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4. Where are the cones in Europe?
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We travelled approximately 2800 miles on our journey and guess where all the road works were? Mostly, around the Dartford Tunnel. I suppose it's par for the British course. It was amazing though that we could actually travel at 110 km/hr in France and Spain and stick to that. When we were planning our route, we knew we could achieve that as an average.

On return to Britain we did 30 miles in our first hour from Dover and about the same for the second hour. Britain's roads are a disgrace! Enough cones to start an ice-cream franchise and not a single person working there! Plenty of people standing around and looking important, but no work! Why? I might like to put cones in my Room 101, but I'm in the wrong review.

Lesson Learnt: Cones are best with ice-cream and a flake!


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5.My dad has criminal tendencies
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After 24 hours of weary travel we stayed at a fabby cheap Etap hotel in Bordeaux. We felt refreshed and some of us had a stunning night's sleep, others of us just continued the insomniac tendencies they always have. Anyway, we parked our car in the hotel car park which had a barrier on the entrance and exit.

When we left Bordeaux, we had to negotiate the car park exit barrier. By negotiate you'd probably think 'put ticket in and drive under' but it was more like this:
This is my dad talking, not me by the way "10 Euros is way too much for a stay in your car park, will you accept less? No? Well sod you then, I'm not paying! In fact neither of us are paying, and we won't pay either when we come back. And if you ask me it's a bit bloody stupid only having half a barrier. Better get it fixed or everyone's gonna be driving round it!"

I couldn't help thinking that my dad was driving a tad faster than before and that the Gendarmerie were after us all the way to Spain, but I believed him when he said he'd get rid of them in a tunnel in the Pyrenees, or a man he knew would!

Lesson learnt: Jumping the barrier may lead to increased petrol consumption.

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6. Hurricanes are a pine tree's worst nightmare
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Last year I stayed in the South West of France and we did part of this journey on our holiday. Bordeaux to Biarritz is one of the straightest and most boring stretches of road I think I've ever come across. It's basically a straight dual carriageway that passes through acre upon acre of pine forest. Tree after tree after tree. And then some. More pine trees than you can shake a stick at.

However, what made it a bit more interesting this year was the aftermath of the hurricane in January. I say interesting, but not in a light sense, we were completely taken aback by the sheer amount of whole fields that had been stripped of trees and the huge piles of logs that had had to be cut down and transported away from the site.

It was quite frightening to think that mile upon mile upon mile of trees had been 'executed' by nature. Something almost as damaging as humankind then. Very frightening to think of the oxygen we've lost and the carbon we've gained from one freak weather situation.

This was quite a sobering section of the journey and one we spent very quietly I have to say.

Lesson learnt : Boring can be beautiful!


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7. My mother has an unwavering faith - mine is patchy in places
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We had successfully driven over the Pyrenees with a little stop near Pamplona and a half hour in the glorious sunshine. After a coffee and an ice-cream, we generally felt like these were indeed our holidays. Hurray.

An hour later - don't the hours whizz by when you're having fun?- my brother overtook us, mouthing the words " I'm desperate for petrol". It took us another two attempts to understand him. My mum then mouthed back, "It's Ok love we'll find some." She'd clearly had her head in a magazine for the last hour as we could have been on the set of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly". This was Spaghetti Western country extraordinaire, with nothing, apart from the odd hundred wind turbines, in sight. We pulled off the dual carriageway and stopped on the hard shoulder of a slip road.

Mother: "How desperate are you?"
Brother: "Desperate - might do another 20 mile"
Mother: "It's Ok love, we'll find some"
Me: "Mum, it's 20 past 5..... on a Sunday.... In Spanish Bandit country!"
Mother "Oh ye of little faith! Seek and ye shall find" and other prize quotations from the Good Book.

Well, we took a slight detour to find a tiny village, where two little old angels were sitting on a piece of cardboard on a metal bench ( DIY comfortable seating) outside a church. They actually had halos. But they didn't speak a word of English.

Time for GCSE Spanish daughter to get practising I thought. And, hey, the girl done good! 8 kms down the road was a garage that was open until 6pm she said. We couldn't thank the little old women enough. We only stopped hugging and kissing them when they got the pepper spray out.

At two minutes to six, with both cars filled up and a wave of relief flooding over the passengers, we were back on the road again. My mother really enjoyed saying "Told you so" and went on about it for the next two hours.

Lesson learnt: Petrol is important. Don't run out!


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8.What do you mean there's more than one road to Alicante?
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I had successfully navigated my dad around the Zaragoza ring road, back on the road to Alicante, past Valencia and we were becoming more relaxed at the prospect of our journey being over in the next two hours. We would be at the caravan in time for a pizza. Yay!

We kept following the signs for Alicante and I momentarily nodded off, only to be woken up by my dad saying, "Angela, which Alicante, which Alicante?" as there were not two, but four road signs emblazoned with the word. The map was on the car floor, I was drooling like you do when you're partly comatose and in my dream Clint Eastwood was putting petrol in the wrong end of my car!

Needless to say, I unwittingly made the wrong call on this one and two hours later we were in the dark, nowhere near Alicante at a petrol station (how do they always manage to get in there) that was still open. Tempers were frayed. Lots of calming words had to be said and we asked the girl at the checkout how to get to Benidorm from here, hoping for the best.

We weren't too far away as it happened, it just meant we weren't going to get there for a pizza. Booo!

Lesson learnt: Don't ask Clint Eastwood to fill your car up!

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9. Our kids are absolutely amazing
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In all of the four days that we were trapped in two vehicles travelling the 2800 miles or so, our five girls were truly angelic. If anything, they taught us adults how to behave. From them I learnt that it's better to sleep around the Peripherique, it's better to bring a Nintendo DS and say you can't read a map and the best thing to do on a long journey like this is to watch Friends, back to back.

There were the two youngest kids in the bigger car with me and the grandparents, while the three oldest were in the smaller, hotter car with the trendy uncle and auntie. They never argued once, with us or between themselves, they never complained about the length of the journey or the heat in the smaller car with no air-con and they never really bothered us. No one said "are we nearly there yet?" cried or threw up - which is a minor miracle with my youngest daughter's history.

In fact, all in all, they were almost too good to be true. Or they were concocting some plan to get money out of us during the holiday - which they did, come to think of it, quite successfully, and they stayed up really late and got to do lots of fab things. Ingenious I'd say!


Lesson learnt: When kids go quiet, they're usually after your money!

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10. I'll be there for you...
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The beauty of modern day travel is the gadgetry that you can now plug into a car. In the back of our car alone we had mobile phones, Nintendo DS paraphernalia and a DVD player. The last of these three was worth its weight in gold as it kept the kids glued to the screen when they weren't asleep or glued to another screen. (Some European countries might class this as child cruelty I'm sure.)

Well, to cut a long story short, again, I managed to learn the exact timing of a Friends episode almost to the half a minute as every 24 minutes 48 seconds or thereabouts there'd be another rendition of :

So no one told you life was gonna be this way - ev-ry-bod-y-clap
Your job's a joke, you're broke, you love life's D.O.A,
It's like you're always stuck in second gear,
When it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year,
But, ill be there for you, (when the rain starts to fall)
I'll be there for you, (like I've been there before)
I'll be there for you,
'Cos you're there for me too...... (guitar sounds now)dangdangadadangdangdangadadannnnnnggggggg..... !

Lesson learnt: Friends should always be there for you, especially on a long, long, long journey to Spain!


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It had been a tremendous journey and one I'm sure to do again (seeing as I can't afford any long haul, luxury these days.)

To say we were glad to arrive might be an understatement, but the journey itself had been a fantastic experience for me, one that I had laughed, cried and felt frantic on. It's an amazing privilege to have the freedom to embark on such an adventure and one that some people can only dream of.

When we safely arrived in Spain my mother kissed the ground, in true Papal style. Thankfully the beds were made up which we crawled into, without brushing our teeth can you believe and were zonked for the next two days, almost. The kids woke me up for some money I think!

Summary: The wheels on the car go round and round, round and round, round and round....