Sleepy Suffolk

And so it came. The grand day out, the day we took JotaLu’s cherub, his very own talkative Ford Fiesta out on the wide roads going North.

Now some folks when they dream of holidays, adventures, and the likes immediately picture themselves in a hammock on some remote Carribean island or in a safari or even perhaps coast-to-coasting in the USA.
All’s that nice and well but we tend to overlook our own countries - our home nations that often have more than one surprise round the corner.
Having said that, I’d like to go to a safari too. My friends at http://www.longerwaydown.com/ are doing one hell of a roadtrip. BUt with only a few days to spare, it wasn’t quite feasible.
The other thing is that one of my housemates (a dude from Madrid - poor fellow) has recently agreed to pile in another six months of Ipswich life and would therefore like to drive his little Fiesta all the way from Madrid to Ipswich. Now, to do that, there are roughly three ways:
1. take a ferry in Bilbao or Santander that goes straight to W&E Sussex / Kent
2. take a ferry or the Eurostar in France that goes to Kent
3. drive up all the way to Hoek van Holland and ferry your way across to the quiet Essex town of Harwich, only a stone’s throw away from Ipswich. You can even avoid Colchester, its rowdy military and its Essex girls…

So, JL (that’s his name) were stroking our beards and pondering on our options: obviously we wanted to taste Spanish Rioja, sip French Bordeaux and abuse of Belgian beer! And hey presto, here we were pinning out on a map which cities we were off to.

A. Madrid - starting point - in the wee hours of the morning (so by Spanish standard that’s a few minutes shy of high noon)
B. Bilbao, spend the night there, hopefully hook up with some Spanish Erasmus friends
————— the border ——————
C. My hometown(s) - with a bit of luck my family beachhouse
D. Paris, the capital bien sûr, to hang out with the BT ring there
E. Bruges because I must say the movie with Colin Farrel was a riot
F. the ferry (Hoek van Holland / Harwich)

This blurb on a map looks like this:

Ver mapa más grande

More to come…

The City Hall fallas in Valencia - 16 March 2007

After a couple days spent in Madrid, Andreas and I boarded a slick Alfa train on route to Valencia. As it glided through the sleepy Spanish countryside, I hooked up my headphones to the internal radio and comfily . It left Atocha Station fifteen minutes into the twenty first hour of the day and eventually arrived a few moments into the new dawn.
It was a special weekend in Valencia as it was the town’s festival culminating in one of the world’s greatest fireworks on the Saturday evening and fallas burning down to ashes on Monday evening.