And so [lose 100 points] the exciting journey home begins. Exciting because we really don’t know what’s going to happen with the storm that is floating about and messing with the Iberian peninsula’s weather or, indeed, England’s weather, come to that.
Our fifth storm of this trip, storm Joseph, is a big baddie that is threatening Spain. Somewhat unusually, I think, there is another storm a little north of Joseph, storm Chandra, that is smacking into Ireland and Britain. These two storms, one above the other, are expected to merge and the resultant nasty combination would affect both the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel. The combined system has been tagged storm Kristin. If I were being picky I’d call that our sixth storm in six weeks. Weather maps and predictions are a bit on the uncomfortable side. This map has dreadfully unclear detailed icons but it does, at least, show the extent of the yellow, orange and red alerts. [Source: ElTiempo.es with data from AEMET.]
Our return boat is timetabled to leave from Santander at 13:00 on Saturday 31st. For that to happen, the incoming boat has to be able to leave Portsmouth late on Thursday 29th to get to Santander and be turned around. All we can do is to make our way through Spain on the assumption that it will go ahead as planned.
Our initial plan was to head for Zaragoza today, a journey of 430kms and spend two nights there, giving time to see the town of Zaragoza if the weather cooperates. Then we were thinking of heading for the free overnight area at the Leclerc supermarket at Miranda de Ebro for the night of Friday 30th, which gives (what should be) an easy 2-hour shot to Santander. From either Zaragoza or Miranda de Ebro, our back-up route could be up the west coast of France to the western Channel ports or, further, to the Channel Tunnel but, fingers crossed, that doesn’t become necessary.
So, this morning we made an 08:00 start from Alcalalí to make for Zaragoza. Very high winds had been forecast in the Jalón area for the afternoon, hence the early start to try and miss them and miss them, we did. After an hour and a half we sailed past Valencia before turning inland to head for Zaragoza passing Teruel.
The sky was vary heavy as we stopped at our favoured bar in Barracas, complete with its “Lady Bar”. The restaurant cooks largely in a wood-fired oven, though we’ve only ever wanted a snack. On this occasion the coffee and tortillas were great.
It transpired that what the sky was heavy with was snow and it began falling while we were in the Barracas café. The road hits 1225m and the snow persisted. At first it wasn’t settling on the road but as we climbed to the higher points of the plateau, the outside lane began to collect a thin covering. I was happy to follow the regular traffic in the inside lane as we past a combined gritter/snowplough working the outside lane.
The snow continued falling for almost 200kms spanning Teruel but didn’t become any more scary. We spotted four or five more gritter/snowplough trucks split between the two carriageways. It was comforting to see the Spanish taking things seriously.
As we finally descended from the higher elevations towards Zaragoza, the temperature climbed from 0°C to a balmy 4°C and the snow turned to rain. We were through the worst of it.
After almost six hours, including our comfort break at Barracas, we arrived at the Zaragoza campsite at about 14:00. We had hit light snow but had missed the wind, which was apparently very strong in the Jalón area in the afternoon. It is damp but very calm here.
Time for a drink or three.
Recent Comments