A Pea Souper to Vic, Catalunya
Zagan the motorhome’s about a mile from the centre of Vic, Catalunya, Spain. He’s in a free aire provided by the town (N41.93493 E2.24048), in among trees overlooking an athletics track and what appears to be a rugby pitch. Do Spaniards play rugby? Or should I ask, “do Catalans play rugby?” – it seems at least half the population here don’t want to maintain their 5 or 600 hundred year old marriage with Madrid.
Free motorhome aire, Vic, Catalunya
Last night a Spanish motorhome joined us for the night. Our memories of four years ago have without doubt blurred somewhat over time, and this time around we’re travelling some of the richer parts of the country, but neither of us recall seeing so many Spanish-registered motorhomes. Nor could we recall there being so many aires being provided for us – we’re feeling very positive about Espagne!
Last night’s fog took a late siesta, clearing the way for a sky-wide view of the northern hemisphere’s stars before we hit our drop-down sack. Pulling back a curtain this morning revealed such activity to be pointless: the fog was back with a vengeance, pushing up against the van side, hiding the rambla to the front of us.
Give a grown man some fog and a torch…
Ju checked the BBC news: turns out today is the 40th anniversary of Franco’s death. Our last tours have contributed a little nascent historical knowledge to my ale-addled noggin. War films had given me an (albeit massively weighted) view of 20th century German and Italian dictatorships. Similar(ish) situations in Romania, Portugal, Spain, Greece and Yugoslavia went previously undetected in my cranium. Here in Spain events conspired to lead Franco to collapse his own country into civil war just before the rest of Europe mangled itself in what became WW2. ‘Civil’ seems a most unsuitable word to describe what gut-wrenching acts compatriots inflict on one another during such terrible times. The bridge at Ronda comes to mind – a beautiful, masterpiece of a structure spanning a gorge which saw people being thrown off it. Spain unsurprisingly wants none of this, just how does a country re-unite? From what we’ve seen (or not seen), the approach here has been to keep quiet about it all – a ‘well, that’s all in the past now’ kind of approach. With a drawn-out war won, Franco did what he fancied for the following decades until he eventually unwillingly released power by carking it.
40 Years in Peace – an ambiguous headline – although I assume Catalans aren’t fussed about whether Franco made it into Heaven
Back to our own wee reality: the freedom we’re wallowing about in quite quickly becomes absolute normality. We find ourselves referencing what we would be doing if we’d continued our old careers, in order to regain clarity. “Probably stuck somewhere on the M42?” “Getting up in the dark, rushing about to get dressed”. “Frantically pulling together a powerpoint presentation to give to management at 3pm before a 2 hour drive home”. That kind of stuff. This morning we were literally at a fork in the road: south-east to Barcelona or north-east to the Costa Brava. The choice in itself was enough to slap us about: good choice to get outta the office guys.
While we both loved Barcelona the last time we drove there, it’s a big city, which needs a bit of additional effort and money to enjoy safely. Nah, both members of Team Zagan who have the vote went for the same option: Costa Brava it is. Rather than pile all the way to the coast in a single dash though, we programmed our SatNav for Vic: another Catalan town on the way there, and one with a reputed cracking Saturday market. Another bonus: the red road here’s been upgraded to a full-on freebie motorway since our 5 year old map was printed. And on top of that, Brucie Bonus #2: the perfect black-top was empty: much as we imagined a brand new M1 would have been all those years back.
It gets foggy around here apparently.
Montserrat appeared out of the mists to the south, like a giant ink blot testing our sanity.
Despite the pea-souper, the drive was the easiest we’ve done in days. In we cruised, finding our spot in the aire alongside a French Hymer. My beard was removed, Ju correctly guessing that “your hair’s got long enough now you feel it’s rebellious enough without the beard”. Yup. Rebel without a beard I am, again.
It’s just a mile walk into the centre of Vic from here, past the town’s university and cleverly adjacent bus and train stations. Ju sniffed out the tourist info and popped in. I found myself in the tractor-beam of a hard-sell sausage flogger, following the shouting tat-flogger like a zombie into his shop. He was talking Catalan, or was it Hungarian? Whatever it was, the message was the same: “bring your dog in, no problem, look-no-buy, I do you good price etc etc”. Cured sausage is a speciality here. He cut off not one but four slices. I ate one: it tasted nothing special. I wondered how to escape. Ah yes: Ju, I’ll use her as an excuse, genius. “Dos minutes”, I hold up two fingers as I tried to drag a wide-eyed meat-sniffing Charlie to the door. Purposefully misinterpreting the seller held up two massive sausages. My turn to go wide-eyed: “No, no, I’ll come back” – all pretence of Spanish/Catalan/whatever language speaking was gone.
Finding Ju in the tourist place opposite I managed a garbled explanation of what was going on before emerging back into the light and back into the tractor beam of the sausage-waving bloke in the tourist trap shop opposite. Shit. Eventually the €10 a sausage price was mentioned, at which point I’d given up and was fumbling for my wallet. Ju to the rescue: “No, thanks, too much, not for us”, and we left. Quite how we left I don’t know: Ju must have previously interfered with his tractor beam whatnot.
After that shambles we made a game attempt to follow the tourist trail, but without much enthusiasm, and carefully avoided the loop back around past the no-doubt distraught purveyor of low carbon-mile cured meat produce. Vic’s a pretty place, especially the central square. The market’s on tomorrow. Bring it on.
Looks like Vic was bombed in the civil war. The plaque’s tiny – Ju spotted it next to the Roman Temple.
Vic town square – still wonderfully gravel
Romans were here
One last piccy: spotted in the town, presumably created by someone who doesn’t have a dog. I’ve tried explaining to Charlie where he can and cannot wee once outside, and so far, after 8 years of trying, he’s taken not a blind bit of notice.
Cheers! Jay
“May the force………….”
Hah Ian, you should have seen me dancing about the place, must have confused a few locals to see the light flashing about the sky and someone making a ‘wooomph woomph’ noise. :-) cheers, Jay
Thanks for comment about Spanish Aires. I had not realised they were developing these but now I see they are listed in detail on campingcar-infos.com (brilliant resource). That makes Spain an even more attractive option. I am confused about Tourist Tax. It seems many places levy a tourist tax if you stay on a camp site or use a hotel etc. However you don’t mentioned tourist tax at all – is that not payable on aires? Does it vary from place to place? I am planning a big trip next year and as funds are very tight I need to know what our daily costs are likely to be. Any info would be very welcome.
Hi guys! Aires charge either nothing (some have free water/loo emptying/grey water, some even have free electricity although not many) or they charge a flat fee. There is never a mention of tourist tax on any aire we’ve used (not that I can recall anyway). So if an aire is, say, €6 a night, that’s what you pay. If an aire is free, you literally pay nothing. If an aire charges, say, €2 for 100 litres of water, then you pay €2, no additional taxes. You can also free camp on car parks in much of Spain. Check out park4night.com as well, we’ve just started using it and are finding it as good as campingcar-infos.com if not better. You can pay a yearly subscription for this which gives you an offline copy on a tablet for example, which also caches google maps, so you can easily scan around the area you want to visit wile on wifi, then later when offline scan the same area. Only problem is no photos are downloaded, but we find the comments are the most useful bits of info and they all come down, albeit it whatever source language they were written in (good for improving you language skills). We’ve met people who have travelled for months without staying on paid parking, although we tend to mix it up a bit we rarely stay on campsites unless we have to (Croatia for example). Cheers, Jay
Gret pic in the fog obi one kenobi. May the force be with you! Love your blog, were prepping to do similar next year when I retire and picking up loads of sound information. Thanks
Cracking Dave, come on in, the water is lovely. Currently supping my 80c a litre lager awaiting a Catalan market in the local square tomorrow. Cost to stay here in among a crew of other motorhomes: €0. Hard life this, hard life. :-) Jay
Love the sausage saga made me chuckle Jo x
Cant wait to get into that life style, were sat with 2 x £5 bottles of red living the costalotta life in miserable weather doing the 9 ta 5 thing. It’s a tough life this :-(
Have recently acquired a Hymer ourselves and tried it out for a couple of nights here and there to get the hang of it….so far so good ! It’s cold here (Scotlnd) right now and we have had quite a lot of condensation on the windscreen in the mornings, even with the roof lights left open a bit, no big deal to wipe it all off etc but wanted to ask you if this still happens in warmer climes and should we be concerned about water running down into the dashboard or wherever it ends up. Really enjoy following the blog, every time I get into the drivers seat I feel an urge to head for the Channel ferry ……!!
Hi Gordon. Welcome to the motorhome fraternity! The condensation happens whenever you’re anywhere cool. We’ve had it for years, and even the most expensive vans get it on the windscreen. Never caused us an issue, and we’ve found by using external silver screens we can reduce it to almost nothing. Cheers, Jay
Thinking back to your incident of the car parking very close to you at night……..
Perhaps he was waiting to see if you had left the handbrake off again. Then he was going to shunt you forwards across the car park and into the bushes for a second time……
Perhaps not…..Sleep well
Hi Jay, thanks for that…..it’s a 2004 van we’ve got, probably similar sized windscreen to yours. I was thinking of getting a long sponge thingy to put along the bottom (of the windscreen of course) to soak up the dribbles !!
Where did you get your external silver screen cover….it’s a big window so I’m guessing it will be a made for Hymer thing ? You lucky so n so’s it’s so cold here that the Hymer (as yet unnamed) drained itself last night ! Thought something was wrong but after checking out the instructions found out that the boiler drains itself when it gets below 4deg C ……and sometimes siphones the cold tank while it’s at it …..beats freezing and damaging the whole thing …oh boy, can’t wait to be heading south with the birds in the winter !