YOU COULD WRITE A BOOK.......

We left my house in Devon at 4am on a very cold and wet June day.  My dad had kindly offered to drive me and my German Shepherd dog, Ice, over to Spain as I had not driven abroad before.  My husband and kids stayed in Devon awaiting the money to go through for the house sale and would follow on in a few days.

Well, we set off and headed towards the Euro Tunnel.  About 20 minutes before arriving, I thought my dad was going to have a heart attack when a car came towards us in the fast lane of the motorway!!  Christ knows how he managed to drive up a motorway the wrong way.

When we arrived at the Euro Tunnel, I proudly had my France and Spain pet health certificates that I had paid loads of money for.  They didn't even look at Ice, never mind ask for the correct paperwork for him.  We drove through Passport Control and there was nobody there so we could have been driving a bomb onto the train quite easily - it is a little worrying, eh?

Anyway, we drove onto the train and stopped.  My dad was well excited and started clicking away with his camera, until I pointed out the bloody huge signs saying that ALL photography was not allowed!  The journey took 34 minutes and was great.  I did not feel at all claustrophobic like I thought I might.

We left the train and drove off on our journey.  We pulled in at a petrol station to refuel.  I went in to pay whilst my dad filled the car up.  Lo and behold, there was a camper van next to our car with a British couple in.  The bloke started up a conversation with my dad which went "We've got a house in the south of France and we go about 5 times a year".  Now, my dad HATES people who show off so replied "I'm driving my daughter down to her new house in the south of Spain where she will reside permanently".  It shut him up.

I have never pretended to be a great navigator but dad had made me the map reader and I did really well (I thought) until we got lost somewhere in the south of France and ended up on a toll road paying there and back within 1 hour because we had gone wrong.  We had a good laugh about it and naturally, I blamed him.

We pulled in to a 24 hour service station, reclined the seats and got some shut eye for about 4 hours.  It would have been longer but Ice went mental barking at some beggar who had approached the car.  He soon moved on and we felt very safe with him in the car with us!!

Now, my dad has a thing about the group The Gypsy Kings and he had brought along a CD of them.  He said as we were crossing the border of France and Spain, he would put it on full blast.  He also said that these days, the border is not manned.  So, there we are approaching the border and dad's got Gypsy Kings blaring out, windows down, etc, etc.  Then we saw the National Police with huge shotguns stopping every car at the border to check it out!!!  I was mortified.  It turned out that a couple of days previous, ETA had set off a bomb and so they were being extra vigilent.  God knows what they made of us....

All of the service areas in France are absolutely spotless.  We stopped off regularly to let out Ice and to use the toilets, etc.  Then we crossed the border into Spain and pulled in to a services in Northern Spain.  There was a guy with a fag hanging out of his mouth in a caravan.  We killed ourselves laughing - we knew then that we had really arrived in Spain.

As we got nearer to Bullas, the long journey was really taking its toll on both of us.  The last 3 or 4 hours were murder.  This wasn't helped by the fact that when we arrived in Bullas (well, it was actually La Copa de Bullas as I had directed my dad wrong again), I asked where my road was to a lady and she looked at me like I had 2 heads.  We eventually realised that we weren't even in Bullas.  My dad still takes the mickey out of me now about that.  He also said (when we were in the South of France) that we would arrive in Bullas at my house at 6pm the next day.  I wish he could predict the lottery numbers with such precision as even with the wrong turn I took, we arrived at my front door at precisely 6pm!!!!