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Hoppo Article April 2008.

Family Desert Adventure Part 2

As you can imagine all of our children wanted to come so we had a discussion and narrowed it down to three for the following reasons:

Simon has been to Russia with me and also did not have the time of work, whilst Emma also was very busy and wanted to start supporting in England and Wales first before venturing of to Africa.

This left Rob (my nephew), Lucy and Dez.

December 22nd 2007. So with the team all set we drove down to Portsmouth docks to catch the Brittany Ferry to St Malo which left at 1030 getting into St Malo at 1930 that evening. On the boat we rested knowing that a long drive was ahead of us.

Louise and I had made the decision to test the budding support teams to the full and with three drivers we were going to drive to at least Santes that evening. In fact we drove in thick fog until 0100 and found ourselves checking into one of those excellent French roadside hotels in Bordeaux. At one in the morning there are no staff on hand so you insert a credit card into a machine and it gives you room keys and opens the gate so within ten minutes we are all asleep in simple but comfortable rooms.

December 23rd 2007. The first test of getting up without any complaining some seven hours later was passed with flying colours. By 0810 we were on our way once more and headed towards the Pyrenees and Spain.

The weather was still foggy until we started to climb up into the foothills of the Pyrenees when we burst out into bright sunshine and snow just south of Pau.

Le menu le Jour at a delightful Hotel in the Pyrenean village of Eauxs Chaudes provided the necessary sustenance for hungry mouths before we continued our journey up to the Col Du Portelet passing into Spain by 1500.

We were using our very standard Green Range Rover 3.9 for this adventure and it was running perfectly as I would expect it to as we always service our cars carefully.

At the Col we stopped to stretch our legs and play in the snow before passing into Spain which seemed incredibly busy. There is a garage just below the Col where we always stop on our journeys south to Morocco and today they seemed very keen to see us on our way. I have never travelled in Spain on the 23rd  December and I know it was close to Christmas and I expected things here to shut down on the 24th but it looked ominously as though it was going to be the 23rd .

Our fears were confirmed just west of Zaragoza whilst we were enjoying a cup of coffee. The waiters told us as they were serving us our coffees that they were closing in ten minutes at 2200 for Christmas. Ah, what about our chances of getting fuel on the way south I wondered? We asked the petrol attendants and they were confident that there would be some garages open on the main routes, but how many they would not know. I decided to keep the tank topped up so every 100km or so we fuelled at deserted petrol stations.

We normally stay at a pension beside the main road running south at Ocana so I phoned to reserve some rooms only to be told that they were closed for the festivities. This was going to be a very testing time for us all as I think that we may be driving until the early hours of the morning.

From Santa Elena south we tried to get rooms but each Hostal was either closed or when the signage suggested that they were open no one answered the door-the whole of Spain was partying it seems. 2300 nothing open, the hours went by and we were tired, 2400, 0100, 0200, 0300 and Estapona was only 100km away 0400 and we were in Estapona and checking into the only open hotel beside the beach, all of us utterly exhausted but in good spirits. Just for the record we had travelled 2000km in two days.

The children were proving to have the mettle to make Impala Support.

                                                   Snow at Col Du Portelet on the border between Franch and Spain