Hopefully you all enjoy roadtrip stories … if not this thread might bore you
An area id never been to was the Pyrenees so last October set about planning a road trip there. The aim as always is getting the roads before the camper vans and cyclists descend on them so mid May was chosen which fitted with most of my friends . Problem with May, as in other mountain areas, is it’s between ski and summer season so lots of hotels closed for their annual shut down.
Either way over the winter months i put together a route planned around doing all the best passes…. With the assumption ( wrongly as it turned out) that May in France / Spain the weather would be good and all the passes open !
Friday
So … most of us met on a summery Friday evening at a pub in Hampshire ready to get the ferry to Spain from Portsmouth. Majority getting this one, but 2 getting the Portsmouth / Caen . Then one other on the St malo and finally Boydy had driven from Scotland and taken the tunnel and driven to down through France staying at our ddk favourite lemans hotel and then with friends near Bordeaux.
There was quite a bit of nervous anticipation for this trip as it was a big one in terms of miles for some of the cars and additionally stories of the Spain ferry crossing being rough are renowned.
We sailed at midnight so we had a 2 night crossing ! As it turned out we had a wonderful time. Crossing was calm , we’d paid for the posh lounge with food and drink on tap and we even spotted dolphins on a regular basis . A couple of the group fully embraced the ‘cruise’ and kept disappearing off to the organised activities
Sunday
We arrived in Santander at 8am on Sunday. Expectations of Spanish sunshine went out the window when we saw the low clouds over the mountain near the port ! Weather was going to have a big part of this trip. Today was a get the miles in day as the first hotel was 283 miles away. I had planned today’s route to start with some twisties up in the hills then keep off the tolls and head east. The plan was then to somehow meet up en route with the 3 other groups that had driven down through France .
Regarding navigation, each days route is basically planned using a number of plot points that are entered onto waze or Google maps in advance… additionally each morning each waze plot is shared onto a WhatsApp group so everyone can click it and know where we are heading .
So, Hill climb one … thick fog and slippy tarmac! Not a great start but the road was good. So good that I might have been slightly pressing on when I rounded a corner to find some motorcycle police who’d just pulled some cars over … he heard me come round the corner and went to step out into the road to stop us, then I think he saw we were English and a group and decided he had enough on with the 2 Spanish cars he’d already stopped
. One close call witching the first 30 mins of a road trip was not a good start ! We soon dropped down the other side and below the cloud cover and headed off to a cafe in the middle of know where to meet Gary and his son. In a master of planning / luck we arrived and about 5 mins later Gary and his green 911 rolled up . Cant fault that timing after all the travel. So onwards to the next meeting stop about 2 hours down the road. These first days of getting some miles in are good … they allow everyone to settle into their cars , get the excitement out of the system and get used to driving as a group again.
So a few hours down the road , unexpectedly we passed the 2 964RS’s heading the opposite way
…. They’d read the instructions wrong and were heading to a plot point on the route which wasn’t the meeting place .. either way it worked out well and we gathered them up . Then finally another hour later we stopped at a strange Spanish road cafe where we met the final car , boydy who’d travelled the furthest of any of us .
So finally as a full group we hit some of the smaller roads and had our final run to our first hotel after a good 7 hours on the road .
With us all at the hotel and we could see what An eclectic mix of cars we were. All air cooled apart from the rogue GT4 which if you’ve been following Sladeys thread you’ll understand why he brought that. Ironically the first mechanical on the first climb we had was thr GT4
. You couldn’t make it up. Luckily it was just a tyre pressure sensor playing up .Unfortunately 2nd mechanical happens as we approached the hotel and the 993 cab snapped its fan belt. No problem you’d have thought as between us we had enough spares … until you realise that 993 and 964 fan belt swap needs a special tool to hold the alt shaft and this tool is not standard in the Porsche tool kit. this could be tackled tomorrow as it was getting late and the bar was calling.
This first hotel was stunning just outside Boltana , east of Pamplona . An old monastery . It was just a shame the food didn’t match the quality of the hotel. Disappointing was the best way to describe the restaurant.
So day 1 complete… long time behind the wheel but great to meet up with friends and finsh the day with some beers. I was looking forward to the next day as I knew it was going to be a good one
