Our Spanish Christmas
Adventure: Part I – the planning
One of the awesome things
about living where we do (Heidelberg, Germany—just in case someone out there
does not know) is that Dave gets the standard German 6 weeks of vacation time
per year. Combined with “bank holidays”
we can generally eek out about 8 weeks of travel! How cool is that?!?!
We learned on during
our first year here, that for us it is rather depressing staying home for the
Christmas holidays. We had no family or
friends to spend it with. Winters here
tend to be cold and very grey and we do not get much snow in our area to make
it prettier. Most things close by midday
on the 24th and they do not reopen until the 27th (the 26th
is still considered Christmas here!).
2012 had the 23rd on a Sunday (when stores are closed in
Germany), so it would have meant everything shut down on the 22nd to
not reopen until 5 days later. The
obvious solution to this little problem is to always plan a trip for the
holiday break J
We are flexible and
can have fun in a lot of places—so we went with budget planning this year. We waited until just a couple of weeks before
departure day, and then I went into my favourite vacation home rental site, put
n our dates and a couple of “interesting” requirements to narrow the field
(wi-fi, and a hot tub) and told it to sort by price—with no limits on
local. And then I scrolled through
looking for anything that we could drive to in one day, or two days if the
route put us through Barcelona. And
that, my friends, is how we ended up spending 10 days in a lovely 3bedroom
penthouse apartment, minutes from the beach, in the Alicante Region of Spain
this Christmas—for the bargain price of 650 including the final cleaning. You’d be hard pressed to put four people n a
youth hostel for that price.
Now, Alicante is too
much to drive in one day—but Barcelona is on the way, so we were all set. Our plan was to pick Rio up from school as
soon as he was done at noon (it’s always a short day before the holidays) and
drive to Barcelona that night. Leaving
at noon for Barcelona meant that we would be getting in very late—sometime after
midnight, but we were up for it. There
is a Holiday Inn Express outside the city that we often stay at before
cruises.
It is safe and clean and has
amazing weekend and holiday rates because it is in a business park and does not
cater to tourists. So, we had the
comfort of knowing right where we were headed, which makes arriving late
easier. We wanted to get all the way to
Barcelona on Friday because Saturday was Rio 14th birthday! The plan was to stay two nights in Barcelona
and drive to our rental house on the 23rd—allowng us to celebrate
Rio’s birthday in style, in Barcelona.
So, with everything
booked, we stuffed the Passat trunk full of suitcases, picnic gear and even a
boogie board and were ready to go. I hope
you’ll join us on our adventure starting in my next post.
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