The road trip from Paris to Madrid is 1250km long. This year given the circumstances we decided not enjoy our habitual pitstop in San Sebastian. We would skip the long walk along La Concha, the crescent shaped urban seaboard of the city and the delicious Basque "pintxos" the local word for small bar bites otherwise known as tapas in the bustling old town.
We would rise at the crack of dawn to avoid the Parisian rush hour starting at 7am and hopefully make it to our destination in time for dinner... Spanish dinner time that is to say is anything after 10pm.
We had cool runnings, we cruised out of Paris watching the long queues form coming into the city. We sailed around Bordeaux, usually a hotspot for traffic riddled with speed cameras. We hardly noticed the border crossing... no check points, no police, no nothing... and were in! Loud cheers and yelling followed by a feeling of accomplishment that we had finally managed to get out of Paris, past the 1km radius, further than the 100km radius and the realization that confinement was definitely over.
We were lucky, the journey took us 12 hours door to door with a few coffee stops along the way. No tourist cars in sight, petrol stations were deserted but trucks were lining the right hand lane of the road from Paris to San Sebastian. We assumed this magnitude of the single queue sometimes denser than others was due to the Iberian border just having opened up and the air transport still extremely limited. Thankfully, however, the lorry drivers stuck to their side of the highway and let us sail by to make it home in time for dinner.
Let the summer begin!
No comments:
Post a Comment