Plank Road: Travel Snags

More than a few things go off the rails when we travel, some are self-inflicted, some just happen, as that is the nature of travel. More often than not, the snags resolve and in some minute way, we tend to benefit from them.

The language barrier tends to complicate things more than usual. We loved having a diesel car as we didn’t have the inconvenience of trying to figure out how to do something so simple as fuel up at a service station very often, as the car went forever on a tank of diesel. Sometimes you have to pay ahead, sometimes you don’t, the pump speaks Spanish and we stand there wondering what it is saying. We had to be extra vigilant with the diesel car, the pumps were colour coded in Catalunya, blue for diesel, there is no colour differentiation in Valencia.

Then there is the problem of trying to find an address of an apartment on a street that doesn’t seem to exist in the GPS or in google maps. When we drove to Teruel, the GPS took us through a huge municipal cemetery, which is a series of buildings and crypt areas, we got out of there only to end up nowhere near our destination. We called the owner who communicated with difficulty that he didn’t know where we were either. However, we noted we were right beside a car wash, which we needed, more about that later.

So off we drove, we just happened to go in the correct direction and saw the old aqueduct, he told us to stop under it, so we did. Then he could not find us, problem was, we were parked on the upper level and should have been on the lower level, of course we didn’t know it even existed. Finally, we were given a more common street, we plugged that into the GPS and found our way to the correct location.

When we left Teruel today we thought we had better wash the car as it was in a mess after getting covered in dust in Catalunya. Rather than complicate matters in Valencia, we wanted to get to the car wash in Teruel which was near the cemetery. For some reason the GPS no longer had that location in its brain, so we just drove north as that was the direction from which we entered Teruel a few days before. Luckily we saw a sign pointing to the cemetery, so we drove through it again and found the car wash.

Stupidly, we didn’t check how much coinage we had before going to the car wash, we had one euro and a .50 Euro, it would have to do. Then we had to figure out which button to push for soap, luckily, a guy just starting washing his car in the next bay so I walked into his bay and looked at his panel and chose the same button, we put the euro coin in and John started spraying like a madman to get the car washed before the time ran out. To switch to rinse, I just checked the panel in the next bay again and we got the car washed and rinsed in time.

We wanted to use the vacuum but only had a .50 and it needed a euro so we took off. When we got to Valencia, we stopped before entering the city to fuel up before dropping the rental car off. This place had a pump attendant in the fuel station who started the pump from the building and waved at us to indicate we could start fuelling, I guess he noticed us dithering too long at the pump. As we were driving out, John noticed a vacuum, so we pulled in to vacuum the car as it was full of sand and gravel that our hiking boots left on the floor. We thought we needed a euro coin for the vacuum, so John noted the word for vacuum and went into the station to get coins, turns out, you have to purchase a special coin from the attendant to run the vacuum.

Driving through Valencia was bit of a trial as we had to go right into the city to the train station to return the car. They tend to straddle lanes here and just skim by each other. We were happy to get behind a bus as we knew if the bus could get down a street, we could. But they are setting up for the Valencia fire festival, burn stuff party, that happens in March, and the bus barely squeezed past parked cars on the street. A lot of cars have scrapped side panels and crunched corners, this is the place to drive a crapmobile.

We got to Valencia way ahead of schedule and in e-mail communication with the apartment owner, we learned that we had to wait four hours before we could meet her at the apartment. Since we were burdened with luggage, we made our way to a park at the end of our street and spent the time witnessing the mating rituals of pigeons and young Valencians, the overuse of camera phones, dogs soaking anything standing vertical and a guy in a John Deere tractor smoothing a small gravel surface with a tow behind blade for hours, seriously.

After meeting the apartment owner who was very nice, we headed out for some groceries. When we got back with our two bags of supplies, there was a woman standing outside the door of the building communicating to us that the lock was broken and we could not get in and the old couple inside the door could not get out, bit of a safety failure in our view. She also communicated that someone had been called to deal with it. We were grateful we happened along when these people were there so we knew what was going on, otherwise we would have been in the lurch.

So we took off and sat outside at a table on the sidewalk at a bar/café and had a café con leche and made sure we waited a long time before going back to see if the lock was repaired. When we got back, the whole lock mechanism had been removed, good enough.

Random, meaningless pics for a travel day....

Tortosa cannon aimed at local hospital