Ruth in Spain!: Thursday 26 September 2013 - The day 'we' drove from Zaragoza to Azpeita

Yes, well, the day we' talked about, laughed about, joked about and privately sweated about was upon us.

Outside The Hotel Paris with all our stuff waiting for the taxi to go to the railway/bus station to pick up our rental car

The taxi driver looked at all the bags and his hands went out and his shoulders went up and he told us about 5 times that we needed a bigger taxi (in Spanish of course). We just looked at him with complete ignorance (I hoped) until finally he opened the boot and we put it all in. He was actually very kind and helpful - at the station he told us where to find the information office and paid the €1for the baggage trolley. We found our way to the rental car office, got through all the paper work and then, after some time, found our rental car, - just quietly, between you and me - by this time the stress levels had gone up quite a few notches .....

...and here's Barry in the driver's seat. For this journey I was more than happy to get into the passenger seat.

So we set off and with the help of the GPS we got onto the motorway which took us all the way to the Azpeitia turn off. I found the long time on the motorway rather tedious although I was distracted from the tedium for a fair bit of the way by the side of the road being on my right instead of my left. At times we got a little too close to the edge for comfort. 4 hours after leaving Zaragoza we pulled into the hotel and "oh the relief". Our first drive on the other side off the road was kind of nerve wracking, Barry was wishing he had a towel to dry the sweat running down his face from time to time, his shirt was soaked by the time we arrived. I wouldn't have been any different. For me it was bad enough being on my side of the car. Suffice to say that it was probably the most tense road-trip Barry and I have ever done together.

There were a number of toll booths along the way and some we had to pay when we went through and others we had to push a button and get a ticket. The first one we got to, we had no idea so sat there waiting for something to happen and after being parked for a few minutes we realised that there was a ticket to pull out of the machine, duh! After dealing with a couple of tollbooths we decided that the slow approach was best so we'd slow down to a crawl until we were sure of where to go and what we had to do when we got there. This worked well. Fortunately there wasn't a lot of traffic on the motorway so we didn't have to endure horns blaring at us.

The countryside out of Zaragoza was kind of flat and very dry with hundreds of windmills and sometimes paddocks of solar energy panels as well. When we got closer to Pais Vasco the countryside became hilly and green and driving from the Azpeitia turnoff into the town was a lot like driving through hill country in NZ. Of course, green means 'rain' and we've been told many times that it rains a lot here. We're just hoping that it doesn't mean as much rain as in Auckland.

Here's some photos I took out of the car window as we were driving along

On the motorway leaving Zaragoza