driving

Bonnie is the Star!

~ Kate Wilson ~ 3 Comments
  • A sunny Saturday and I took Bonnie out in the car.   We took the windy route over the hills towards the sea which is one of my favourites as most of the traffic goes the other quicker way.  People drive faster here perhaps because most of them have have been driving these same roads all their lives. If you don’t move far from where you were born you probably know each and every bend. And if you assume that all other drivers are similarly confident you won’t have much patience with ditherers like me. 

 

  • At the top of the hills there is a derelict petrol station and if you turn off there it leads to a quiet country lane with views down to the sea.  We parked and walked. There were lots of cyclists around who surprised me with their total disregard for the large signs warning that the hunters were out shooting wild boar in the woods. 

 

  • In the local newspaper El Nou they recently reported a cyclist being clipped by a bullet as he rode along a popular route in Les Franqueses.  Five hunters were stopped by the police and their guns taken away as evidence. These hunts are normally approved by the authorities but they are supposed to keep away from houses and roads. That local council has even been discussing banning hunting as it is impossible for it to coexist with the growing numbers of people who like to walk, cycle, run in the countryside.  But they finally decided that banning it would only make it less regulated.  Hunting is very popular throughout Catalunya and I once had lunch at a country restaurant with a truck parked outside loaded up with a very large and dead wild boar.  I wonder what it would take for the Catalan government to ban it altogether?

 

  • We sat down for a while with the sound of shots ringing in the far distance. Bonnie brought me a twig and as my main task now to keep her as happy as possible,  I broke my normal rule of not throwing sticks. It was also a very soft one! She is totally back to normal after the surgery  

 

  • It was a joy to watch her jumping to catch it like a puppy

The battle with fear

~ Kate Wilson ~ 5 Comments

I had a friend in Edinburgh many years ago and we used to talk about our anxieties of which there were many. We called them General Fears and imagined a character, a military man who was in charge of all frightening experiences and who doled them out as necessary for character building.

Fear – where does it come from?  Why is one person more prone to it that another?

When fear has been a major part of your life you have various options.
-You can live with it and adjust your life accordingly ‘no I never go there/do that/speak to those people’ etc etc. You put safety first. Life may be narrower and less exciting but it feels more secure.
-You can challenge your fears and Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. This works and in theory fear should get weaker and you become more confident. Over years this can sometimes be exhausting as in my experience General Fears does not accept defeat so easily.
– So usually we do a mixture of both the above, depending on how important it is and how strong we are feeling

Two days ago I planned to drive to the coast, taking in a little village called Saus on the way. I am not very confident driving here but it is much better than around Granollers so I wasn’t having to struggle too hard with fear. I set off early and got slightly lost, ending up on a very narrow road. A large van was coming in the opposite direction and although I pulled right into the right side, he knocked me as he went past very fast. It took a couple of moments before I realised the wing mirror was smashed and unusable.
Aha – an opening for General Fears to come in!
I drove to the village of Saus, thinking of having a coffee and a chance to think. But the streets were narrow, my van felt huge and hard to manoevre without the side mirror.  I faffed around for a while indecisively then drove on to Escala. So far driving wasn’t too bad but I was on automatic pilot.
Breakfast in a beautiful seaside town. Thank goodness speaking Catalan is no longer a problem. I asked for a VW garage and was told the nearest was in Figueres.
At this point fear threatened to take over. I felt totally alone in a foreign county.

Alone alone all all alone. Alone on a wide wide sea.
‘Why did I come here?’  ‘Why am I not back in Cornwall where I would know what to do?’

But something had to be done and so I drove back to Figueres. I already had been there twice and not enjoyed the drive. Going back without my side mirror made it extra interesting.
But what amazed me was that while I had battled my fear and won, it still continued to fight back. I was driving on a busy road, with a lot of faster traffic. My body went into panic mode while my mind looked on in amazement. I was sweating, waves of fear swept up from my feet to my head, I felt sick and dizzy, I would have stopped and waited till it passed except that there were no places to stop.

-Is this fear something from childhood?
-Is it something from our ancestral past that once was useful for survival but now is unnecessary?   -Why do some people not have this level of fear?  They are the ones who look at you with disbelief or say things like ‘pull yourself together’ How come they were so lucky – is it genes?

Anyway, I did manage to find the garage.  I was able to ask directions in Figueres (thank you Catalan lessons) and when I arrived they  did the repair immediately which cost 50 euros. In 20 minutes I was out again with a new mirror and I set off again for the coast, refusing to allow myself to go ‘home’ rather than face those roads another time.

Being taken to the Cleaners in Granollers

~ Kate Wilson ~ 4 Comments

One of my challenges this week was to take the van to the cleaners.
There is a car wash business on the little square where the dogs go every day.
My indoor parking space is a few hundred metres down the same street.
So not such a big deal!
Well….. for me in my new state of anxiety about little things……it felt like something I had to build myself up to.  The hard parts are – getting the van out of the tiny parking space, knowing what to do in the car wash building – where to go, when to pay etc etc (A good chance to revisit that female discomfort when entering a masculine world), getting the van back into the tiny awkward parking space. And of course speaking all the time in castellano.

One of my lessons this week is ‘If there is an easy way, chose that one!’
So Pep came with me for the first part. I did all the driving and speaking but I felt more confident that he introduced me to the place where obviously they know him.
Is this the 21st century?  Are you almost 55?  For goodness sake woman!

Actually the bloke doing the cleaning jumped into the van to drive it onto the ramp and had to get out again immediately when he found he was in the passenger seat.  First time for him in a UK van.

They were all very friendly and it cost 15 euros for inside and out which I thought was reasonable.

They have a huge conveyor belt so no one has to drive the vehicle as it passes through.
The machine was called CHRIST

At the end there was a dryer which puffed out hot air as it raised up to let my van pass through.
I wished I had someone with me to share the joke – Christ is Risen, Hallelujah!

Great confidence afterwards so Bonnie and I drove to a further away country park, Mil Pins, for a peaceful  and green walk.

Not so easy as they say on the packet

~ Kate Wilson ~ 5 Comments

Perhaps it’s because we are amateurs but we discovered that Self Levelling Cement doesn’t!

You have to push it around a lot with a long thing like a rake which gets all clogged up in the process.

Tips for Spreading Self Levelling Cement

1. Add more water than they suggest
2. Never try to mix and spread more than two bags at a time
3. Buy the special whisk fitting for the drill.  It’s  worth the money although we did have a very cathartic fit of giggles as three of us tried to smash up the lumps and stir with long sticks like the three witches in Macbeth.  There is a 20 minute window before the stuff starts to set.

No pictures yet – we’ll see how it looks in the morning and perhaps I will take a photo…..

Meanwhile I am very pleased to have solved one of my long standing problems – at least in theory.      I am going to register my UK camper van in Spain and it will join the club of right hand drive vehicles which have Spanish number plates. First step is to get my registration document here changed to show it is no longer a panel van. Second step – or steps as I imagine it will involve a lengthy bureaucratic journey – is to get it approved in Catalunya.  Then at last we will both be able to drive it (UK insurance won’t cover a Spanish national driver) and most importantly I won’t have to travel back every year to get an MOT.

I will report back on progress but for the moment I am so pleased to have found a solution.

Update on the RHD van decision

Another thing which is not so easy as they say is dealing with car registration in Spain.

It is now 2015 and I never did register the van in Spain.  The following year we took a long journey up through France to Scotland and then back down to Cornwall.  Because I was never able to get my partner’s name on the insurance I did all the driving and ended up with tendinitis in my ankle from too much clutch control on the Scottish mountains.  I couldn’t drive back to Spain so we bought a LHD car in the UK and drove back together in that. Since then, the van has been garaged in Cornwall and we only use it over there.

I had such a lot of trouble getting the LHD Spanish car into my name once we got home that I would never recommend you try to bring over a UK car. The system here in Spain is much more complicated and bureaucratic and unless you enjoy the adrenalin rush of endless stress and uncertainty then I suggest you buy a car over here.

the longest day

~ Kate Wilson ~ 3 Comments

We were so relaxed after the beautiful swimming pool that we couldn’t get the necessary push to do our 300 km the next day. So we travelled 100 instead to Nice and met up with my sister and family who were also on their way to Tuscany and the birthday party. The campsite at Cagnes Sur Mer is nothing special but our luck held out and they found us a place although they were full!
The next day we paid the price of our ‘pausa’ and had the longest journey of the trip so far. My sisters family took a sardine tin  train trip to Ventimiglia on the Italian side of the border.
We drove there and also got caught up in the weekly market crowds

Driving through Genova was another mistake –  a futuristic nightmare of tangled roads on stilts which never ended.  I was the passenger and spent most of the time with my eyes closed.
We were aiming for the Cinque Terres – five small seaside towns  which are part of a marine nature reserve.

If I say the words bends, mountains and tunnels perhaps this will give an idea of this part of the journey.  There was a series of tunnels only the width of a car which was exciting at first but became claustrophobic when the darkness never ended.
The road was beautiful and different from anything else on the trip so far

but time was racing on and as darkness fell we still didn’t have anywhere to camp.

Some sites were full. Others said ‘no dogs’.  I felt my heart sinking with each rejection and was impressed by Pep’s never ending optimism. At time like these it is good to have different personalities.
Just as we began to accept the idea of sleeping in the car we found the campsite Saint Michele – thanks I am sure to the same benign saintly presence who takes care of Penzance and Sant Michaels Mount.
Lovely people, dogs welcome, a relaxed and hippy atmosphere and although all our tents were tightly packed into a very small space,   it felt like the best campsite yet.

There is something about camping that feels medieval to me – the footsteps passing in the night, sounds of voices and snores and wheezes and sneezes, walking to the communal areas for water and washing, sleeping on the firm ground with your dog at your side.

Finding this place was like a miracle – finding somewhere to lie down at the end of a long day of spinning round corners, creeping through dark tunnels and careering down hills chased by Vespa scooters can not be felt as anything other than miraculous!
And to top it all, this place was the only campsite we found with hooks on the toilet doors – something so simple can make all the difference.  No need to pee while balancing my bag on my knees.

We woke to the sound of church bells echoing around the Tuscan valley – beautiful.