Spain road trip; pictorial preview of Madrid, thanks to ChatGPT!; A Short History of Spain: Contiki 1982, Portugal/Spain 1989, 1990s Torrox and Nerja; three stages of travel; planning and plotting; learning Spanish; getting there; Hertz so good
So, this is our big trip for 2026 – a six-week-long Spain road trip! Last year, 2025, it was a cruise, Canada and the US: a Holland America cruise from Sydney to Vancouver, followed by 10 days in Vancouver and a road trip down the US west coast to California. (See here for my post on Lake Tahoe and work backwards to Vancouver, if you like.)
When I gave ChatGPT a photo of myself – hair newly waved – and asked it for a picture of me and my new iPhone in Madrid, this is what it came up with. Impressive, hey? I almost suggested we cancel our flights.
A Short History of Spain*
- Or, more accurately, my own history of visiting Spain. (I’ve always fancied writing a short history of some-thing.)
Contiki Expedition
Spain is a big country, and I’d not yet seen much of it. That 1982 six-week Contiki trip of Europe briefly ducked south from France to give us a few days on Spain’s Costa Brava. We stayed in the Contiki section of La Ballena Alegre, a camping destination that is still flourishing. One day, we did a city tour of Barcelona, about 160km each way.
There was a drunken sangria party on the beach; there was shopping and ice-cream on La Rambla. That’s all I recall of Barcelona… though my good friend Julie Wood, a Durban girl whom I’d met on the ~ and who has been my friend ever since, possibly remembers more than I do. Make a comment, Julie!
Portugal & Spain 1989
In 1989, my sister Dale and I had a good time backpacking through Portugal for 10 days or so. Here we are, conscientiously working our way through a bottle of chilled white port on the rooftop balcony of a pensāo in Porto after an afternoon of port-tasting. From here, we had a view of the River Douro, which is lined with port houses.
After Dale returned to her job in London, I continued right across Spain on my own, travelling by bus and train through Seville and Granada to Alicante on the east coast, armed only with The Rough Guide to Spain and not a word of Spanish. (Okay, one word. That wasn’t enough. It was a dreadful experience.)
In Alicante, I would get the ferry to Palma de Mallorca, where a yachtie girl I’d met back home in South Africa had offered me accommodation in her share of an old apartment literally built into one of the ancient city walls.
Torrox & Nerja, 1990s
A few years later, Roy and I visited picturesque Torrox, an Andalusian town near Málaga on the Costa del Sol – mainly because Roy’s friends Keith and Sally Eaton had a holiday home there. We flew into Málaga from the UK.
My sister Dale and her husband Colin came with us, and quite soon after that bought a lovely house of their own in nearby Nerja. We joined them there just once, more than 20 years ago, I think. (They live near London and stay in Nerja with their son, Chris, several times a year; we’ll be staying with them in the first week of June.)
Spain Road Trip: Three Parts of Travel
I like to repeat – possibly annoyingly (and definitely without originality) – that the enjoyment of travel consists of three parts: (a) planning and looking forward to it; (b) doing it; and (c) remembering it.
Planning
Spain Road Trip itinerary: Roy the plotter
As usual, Roy booked our Singapore Air flights to Spain a year in advance. (When asked whether he wishes he had a travel agent half as good as mine, he pouts and declines to answer.)
He ordered a huge map of Spain, which came from the US and dominated the dining table for months. We’d be flying both in and out of Barcelona, with a week in Barcelona, another week in Dénia, then on to Madrid for four nights, south to Toledo, Córdoba, Seville, Cádiz, Tarifa (with a day trip across to Tangiers that may or may not involve a camel), Málaga and Nerja. Northwards again to Barcelona via Cartagena and Valencia.
So, there was plenty of plotting, planning and booking to be done… sometimes even in consultation with his wife.
Here is Roy with the grandkids, who are unlikely ever to have seen or – possibly – ever again to see a proper paper map of this magnitude!
Learning Spanish
Traumatised by my 1989 solo trip across Spain, I set about finding Spanish on my Duolingo app and dived into learning the language.
I’d been learning French for years, but it was surprisingly enjoyable to start from scratch with Spanish. At first, you’re seduced by how many words you already know – nouns like actor, animal, bar, chocolate and television; adjectives like artificial, global, natural, normal and special. Ah, you think, this is pretty easy!
And then you start getting into the complexities of the grammar and it isn’t straightforward at all. Is any non-native language easy to learn? For most of us, probably not.
For anyone who hasn’t yet tried Duolingo, this gamified approach to learning – not only languages, but also chess, music, mathematics and more – can be a revelation. I also watched a few Easy Spanish videos online, and worked my way through several Audible books for learning Spanish, like Learn Spanish with Paul Noble for Beginners.
After months of enduring all this Spanish gibberish as the soundtrack to his life, the main question on Roy’s lips was: Will she work up the nerve to actually speak when we get to Spain? Ah, only time would tell.
Spain Road Trip: getting there
There’d been a couple of months of head-shaking by our Australian friends: with “Trump’s war” ongoing in the Middle East, no one could talk about travel plans without first crossing both fingers and toes: the danger, the fuel shortages, etc. (Nothing at all to do with poor governance, of course.)
And almost no one was going to the US, where they’re going to invade the sanctity of our Facebook postings. Imagine that!
(Though no Australian I’ve spoken to is aware that more than 12,000 Brits in 2025 alone were physically arrested for social media postings, under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 21 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. Sometimes, all they’d done was to like a post that went against the woke narrative. See here for more. Or not, if you prefer to continue believing that the UK is a democracy that upholds freedom of speech.)
Spain Road Trip: Hola, Barcelona!
Roy had been fretting about reports of long delays at immigration in European airports due to new EU zone biometric identification procedures. As it happened, we two were the first off a plane that at 7am seemed to be the first of the day into Barcelona; the first at Immigration, where we were waved through seamlessly after a quick photo and fingerprint scan.
Then, luckily, the first at the Hertz counter – she told us they expected 200 bookings to be coming through from 9am. A reasonably priced upgrade got us the comfortably sized 2L Skoda diesel station wagon that we’d be using for the next six weeks.
Spain road trip: next up?
In the first week of our Spanish road trip, discover Barcelona with Verne and Roy. Spoiler alert – despite hiccups with ridiculously bad GPS, we found it to be a wonderful place!
