Driving our electric car from England to Spain
Driving our electric car from England to Spain
I have decided to resurrect my blog after a gap of four years to share our experiences of driving to Spain through France in our electric car to celebrate my 70th birthday in September.
Soon after landing in Cherbourg we had our first experience of charging our car in France. We stopped at a service station where we found a row of high-speed chargers. It was a struggle to work out how to get connected and even more of a struggle to actually disconnect. However, the lovely young Frenchman in the neighbouring car was able to sort things out for us despite the lack of language that we had in common.
Our first night was spent right in the centre of the beautiful medieval town of Vitré with its castle perched on a rock above a gorge. We were in Brittany so where to eat was a no-brainer: It would be crêpes for dinner and, indeed, there was a crêperie only two minutes’ walk away. A little wander around the old town after dinner and we were delighted to find these illuminations around the town on the walls of the old buildings:
The next day we drove 160 miles to La Rochelle (or “My Rochelle” as we have named it, in honour of Joy in the Archers on BBC Radio 4). This time the car charging was much more satisfactory at a restful and quiet service station where we sat on a bench in the glorious sun just near our car. And we were delighted to discover that electricity in France is about 45p per unit compared to 75p in the UK.
For the second night running, the hotel was a similar triumph of suitability for Jane, also in the old town with its own locked underground garage which she was also very happy about. We popped into a nearby bar which specialised in a local drink, La Guignette. According to our guidebook is where they serve the eponymous La Guignette, a “fruity and fizzy, wine-based drink unique to this La Rochelle institution”. It was a very rustic, authentic looking sort of place where we had a small glass of La Guignette together with a bag of monkey nuts for a very small amount of money. Neither of us were terribly impressed with the drink. Perhaps that’s why it has never caught on outside My Rochelle. But we felt we had experienced something truly authentic.
The next day we decided to go the scenic way which turned out to be not particularly scenic but did involve getting a ferry across the mouth of the vast Gironde estuary, into the Garrone and Dordogne rivers flow, quite interesting but not as beautiful as one of our wonderful ferries in the Hebrides. We stopped to charge the car and for a cuppa at Hourtin where we easily got the car charging at the local supermarché before walking 10 minutes to the town square where the old men played boules and we went into the Post Office for stamps. “What’s the word for stamp? I’ve forgotten again”, whispered Jane urgently as we entered the building. I’d also forgotten, so we hastily consulted the French dictionary app on my phone before Jane ventured up to the desk and asked for “cinq timbres pour Angleterre s’il vous plaît”. The lady replied in English and looked amused as she gave us our stamps - she had probably watched our little panic and knew exactly what had been happening.
We spent the next three nights at Arcachon, set by the sea on a promontory into a lagoon of the same name off the coast of the Bay of Biscay. It is an upmarket seaside resort, and a nice place to chill for a while before continuing our travels. On our first full day there we didn’t do much except ascend a nearby sand dune. Well, actually it wasn’t any old dune: At 107 metres above sea level, Le Grande Dune du Pilat is the highest dune in Europe, containing 60 million cubic metres of sand. How many grains of sand is that I wondered. Well, there’s usually at least a billion grains in one cubic metre. So that would be 60 quadrillion (60,000,000,000,000,000) grains. Even more money that Elon Musk has!
As you can guess it’s a bit of a tourist attraction and there were the obligatory cafes, gift shops and a rather tasteful carpark, spread amongst a sparsely wooded forest. Conveniently there were also some plastic steps up the side of the dune; otherwise, it would have been one step up and then half a step down again. However, on our way down we just slithered down the lovely golden, fine, clean sand. The view from the top was amazing.
The next day we took the train into Bordeaux. We were both underwhelmed by the city and the only thing that was of particular interest was the amazing wine museum in which we spent several hours. It is very modern with a peculiar shape which is supposed to represent the swirl of wine as it enters the wine glass. We started by sampling wines at the top of the building whilst enjoying the panoramic views which gives a real sense of the city and its massive river – the Garonne. A full-sized ocean-going cruise ship was parked right in the centre of the city so the Garonne must be pretty deep. We then descended to the extensive exhibition about wine and wine making using every manner of tech to explain everything to us.
On our return to Arcachon, we visited a wine shop very close to our hotel. The proprietor told she was a wholesaler who only stocks Bordeaux wines. I asked if she ships wine to the UK and she replied, “no, only China”. We bought a mixed box of 6 Bordeaux chateau wines plus two bottles of Cremante de Bordeaux for just €58.50 - that’s only about £6 a bottle. (I was worried that, at that price, they might be a bit ropey but have been delighted since our return to find that every bottle so far has been excellent.) And then as a birthday present, she gave me a free bottle of Entre Deux Mers!
The next day - my birthday – we drove for nearly 2 hours from Arcachon to the village of St Emilion, a rather tedious journey round the Bordeaux ring road. We spent a pleasant time exploring the cobbled streets of the old village, trying to ignore the rather poncy yuppified other tourists frequenting the plethora of wine shops and spending hundreds on their bottles of wine. The best bits are always the serendipitous surprises and this time it was stumbling on a jam maker, making and selling jam in his little shop. We then drove the 5 minutes to the Château Hôtel Grand Barrail where we stayed for one night to celebrate my birthday. At nearly three times what we would usually pay for B&B I was expecting something special and indeed we were not disappointed. I visited the nearest two wine chateaus. It’s just as well the first one was closed as their wine – Chateau Figeac – sells for over £300 a bottle. I did, however take a photo of some of their grapes as I retreated down the drive of the chateau.
At the second chateau I bought a couple of bottles of their wine. I was advised that the wine will be better in five years’ time, so I have stuck a label on one of them, saying: “Don’t drink until 2030.” Perhaps on my 75th birthday.
In the meantime, Jane went for a swim in the outdoor pool but returned less than happy after finding it had been taken over by rowdy drunken British yuppies. In the evening, I donned my rarely worn white linen suit, and we went to the formal dining room where our seats were pushed in for us, and our wine bucket was kept at a discrete distance to prevent us from the temptation of pouring our own wine. The meal was delicious with a lovely bottle of Graves white wine, rather expensive, but no regrets.
So how did it feel to be 70? Well, usually when you get asked a question like this, the answer will be a rather nonplussed, “not much different really.” However, I had the misfortune to develop sciatica on my birthday and by the next day it was getting really painful, and I started needing painkillers. So, the answer to that question, might be, “bloody awful, actually!” Although I hobbled around for the rest of the holiday and we bought me a walking stick in San Sebastien, it didn’t actually spoil my enjoyment of the trip and I felt fine when I was sitting down.
The next morning, we set off on a long journey, over the border to Mundaka in the Basque region of Spain where we stayed for 2 nights. It’s by the sea with crashing waves and loads of surfers to watch.
We ate in a tapas bar which was as different as anywhere could be compared to the night before. People were milling around, yattering away in Spanish (like they do in Spain!) and there were no other foreign tourists as far as we could make out, a marked difference to the previous evening when all the people around us in the restaurant were Americans, although very nice Americans. We ordered too many tapas, but managed to sneak some bread, Manchego and jamon into a napkin for a picnic the next day. The chef who brought our food out wore a t-shirt which had on the back: “Mundaka surf shop. The longest Left in Europe.” I had no idea what this meant, but with a bit of Googling I found out it was a reference to the waves that come into the harbour. It was actually at this moment that it occurred to me to write this blog as I could think of a few fun things to share about the trip. So, I would need a photo of the t-shirt and neither my English nor, indeed, Jane’s Spanish managed to communicate this. The mystified chef knew we were asking something of him and looked increasingly worried and threatened. But good old Google helped out again as the waitress asked me to type what we were asking on her phone. When he realised his face transformed into a broad grin and he gladly posed for this picture:
The following day we took the train into Bilbao. The first part of the journey was very interesting as we crossed the pampas-grass-littered marshy estuary of Urdaibai which is a “biosphere reserve”. One of the stops was at Guernica, famed for the 1937 by the Germans during the Spanish Civil War and the resulting painting by Picasso. Bizarrely, a reproduction of this picture was on the wall behind the table where the headmaster would sit in the dining room when I was at high school and I was reminded of this when I saw it a few years ago in Madrid.
On arrival at Bilbao, I hobbled the mile or so to the Guggenheim, not a lot of fun. But the museum was looking spectacular as soon as we saw it across the water. Jane had been here before with my mum about 20 years ago, but it was my first time. The inside was equally magnificent and, as I said to Jane afterwards, it was almost a “Taj Mahal experience” for me – as breathtaking as anticipated. (I call it a “Taj Mahal experience” as I feared that I could only be disappointed after all that I had heard about the Taj Mahal when I visited it in 1975. But I wasn’t. I was blown away. I had a similar experience when I saw the Grand Canyon.)
We both particularly enjoyed an exhibition by Helen Frankenthaler and an amazing installation by Richard Serra called The Matter of Time where massive sheets of rusty metal were made into giant spirals that you could walk between.
We then lunched at the Guggenheim before Ubering to the old town which was very disappointing, our main achievements being to buy a peach for our picnic and get some Ibuprofen (“Ibuprofeno” in Spanish) for my leg. On our return, Jane said she was going for a walk on her own - unencumbered by my snail like pace - whilst I caught up with emails and my diary. Then we went out together for a drink at the bar overlooking the harbour before having our picnic on a bench overlooking the surfers, surfing up the “Longest Left in Europe”.
We drove the short distance to San Sebastien from Mundaka, the scenic route along the windy road on the coast. We stopped for coffee just outside Lekeitio. As we sipped our coffee, I admired the bodies on the beach. Jane’s urge was for a paddle in the sea, so I waited, happily sat on the sea wall and admiring the view. After finding that a charging place on the electric car charging app, Zapmap, appeared to be just a building site, we muddled around the spaghetti roads near San Sebastien before finding a super-fast Tesla charging point near where we picnicked, looking anxiously at the black clouds gathering above us. But the rain held off in fact until after we arrived at our San Sebastien hotel after emerging from the underground car park. We got a taxi to a resto we had booked and shared a turbot for two. However, we also shared an exciting starter of seafood, and I also enjoyed my pud – Pantxineta – which is, I think, a local speciality. And the excellent white wine made from the Albariño grape in Galicia.
Our hotel didn’t do breakfast so the next morning we went for brunch at a place recommended by our hotel where we both had a smashed avocado affair like we’d have in England plus what Jane declared to be the best coffee of the holiday. We walked slowly but surely (my leg was slightly better) round the base of the wooded hill that marks the end of the peninsular beyond the old town. The massive waves were hitting the high sea wall with such ferocity that they were sending up plumes of spray which occasionally drenched us. But the sun was out, and we dried quickly. We had great views of both the San Sebastien beaches and the harbour before re-entering the old town from the other side and stopping at the Constitución Plaza for a beer. We were back in tourist-land with hordes of tourists in groups being told by their guides how the square was once used for bullfighting and still had the numbers of the boxes above each of the windows around the square.
In the afternoon we went on a 45-minute boat-trip round the two bays. We hadn’t reckoned on the choppiness of the sea which made the boat rock violently. I found it quite scary, but Jane loved it. We got great view of San Sebastien. In the evening, we did a pinxto crawl round the old town, as is traditional in there. (Pinxto – pronounced “pincho” - is basically the Basque word for tapas.) We ate some delicious stuff, sampled several wines and enjoyed the atmosphere.
The next day we were on the road again. It was quite a hard drive, starting with the bendy motorways in the hilly areas of Spain and going into France. Then a straightforward stetch before a gruelling last hour on the tiny roads that the satnav decided to take us to our destination of Bergerac on the River Dordogne. We had a nice stop en route picnicking on a grassy bank by a car park in a village where the locals gathered and started a multiple boules tournament. One of them came over to us and wished us “bon appétit!”
For this trip we’d bought a mobile fridge which plugged into the cigarette lighter socket. Some days we would plug it in at the hotel so it would stay cold overnight. Unfortunately, I switched it from cold to warm and when Jane went to get a bottle of cold water from the fridge she found hot water, melted chocolate and ruined cheese. Back on the road again towards Saumur, our next stop on the next big river – the Loire.
After a rather mediocre hotel in Bergerac (although the swimming pool had been a redeeming feature) we were delighted by our Saumur hotel, on the banks of the ginormous Loire and just below the castle. (Why are French castles so much more intact - and elegant - than the British ones?) It was in a lovely old building with an enclosed car park with car charging facilities. In the evening, we walked up into the old town and sat in the town square, once again enjoying “le menu. We then wandered up the hill to the castle and found, to our delight, that it was open and we could go into the main area and stroll around.
The next day was the third of our three-day trawl back through France from San Sebastien. It was slightly shorter and nearly motorway all the way ,so we got to Honfleur (on the English Channel near Le Havre) at about 3pm. It was also really weird because it was incredibly hot when we got out of the car, perhaps the hottest weather of this whole holiday, so strange as we were travelling North and moving into autumn when the weather should be cooler. I hadn’t yet had moules marinières on this holiday and time was running out... To be honest my moules were no better than any I’ve had elsewhere, but I opted for the cheese course for my pud and was very excited by the cheeses I chose, especially the Camembert which we realised is a local cheese.
But I haven’t yet told you about our hotel, the “Ecole des Mademoiselles”, once a girl’s school, but very ancient and half timbered. It must be a few hundred years old, and we had a suite of rooms at a very reasonable price.
Our last day in France was a Saturday, market day in Honfleur and we had a very pleasant morning walking up the cobbled streets amongst the half-timbered houses looking at what was on offer and the myriad art galleries. We nearly bought a large picture but on finding that it would cost £4,000 and we were not completely in love with it, we quickly changed our minds. In one place the street was suddenly paved with tiles with quavers on them (musical quavers – not edible ones). The mystery was explained when we found we were passing the birthplace of Erik Satie. We also looked inside the church of St Catherine, which, like so many buildings in Honfleur, is half-timbered. In fact, it is the largest wooden church in France.
The next day we left before dawn had even cracked, to drive the hour’s journey in the dark to get the ferry at Caen and thence, like William the Conqueror, from Normandy back to England.
This featured blog entry was written by Robin Logie from the blog Becci would have loved it here.
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