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Report 1656: Don Quijote's La Mancha to Granada - and Points in Between

By kathyk from Cadillac, Michigan, Winter 2009

Trip Description: Kathy and three friends spend time traveling around Spain, from February 21 to March 9, 2009.

Destinations: Countries - Spain; Regions/Cities - Andalusia, Barcelona, Catalonia, Other Spain Region

Categories: Family/Friends; Hostel; Foodie Trip; Sightseeing; Independent Travel; 3-4 people

Montseny, a catalan meal, munjetes, ali oli, platter of carns a la brasa and, the half empty purron of wine

La Mancha, (in English), the Stain, the flat tree-less area, South of Madrid, which is a dry plain void of features. You may want to get through it as quickly as possible in order to arrive at the exquisite cities of Andalucia – not so fast! There is a lot to see and appreciate here, plus you don’t have to share it with many other tourists, or even natives – especially in February. I made the driving tour with two friends from Michigan and Carmen, an old friend from Barcelona in the last weeks of February 2009.

The trip had an awful start, or rather non-start. We were stuck 36 hours in snowstorm at the first airport. We were only one hour away from home but we couldn’t ask family to risk life and limb just to get us back home, it was hard enough to get a pizza delivered to the hotel! So, our direct flight from Detroit to Madrid was lost and our substitute flight landed us in Amsterdam the next day. The last leg of our journey was the flight from Amsterdam to Madrid. We took off in overcast skies, immediately losing any view of the city and got above the clouds that looked like a carpet of pure white cotton candy as far as the eye could see. After two hours, we could see the snow covered Pyrenees poking out and, as it turned out, holding back all those clouds from entering Iberia. As soon as we crossed over, we could see all of Spain basking in total sunlight. That raised our spirits.

We landed in Madrid, met up with Carmen, my friend from Barcelona who also had to wait out the delay of our arrival. We went directly to the rental agency to pick up our car, a Volkswagon, four-door, mid size, diesel model. Six gears! which my brother says is usually only a feature in higher end sports cars in the US. I followed ST advice and tried get instructions on things about the car, how to turn on lights etc. But we were in competition for the agent’s attention with another group that arrived just when we did. From their language they seemed to be Russians. They were much bigger than us and aggressive and visions of tangling with the mafia on our first day, caused us to leave without learning how to open the gas latch release. At refill time it took two grown Spaniards and a woman to help us find it.

Leaving the Barajas airport, it was necessary to navigate a spaghetti bowl of roads. I had an enlarged picture from mapquest but it did not indicate that the interchanges were really roundabouts. There are no straight runs with clover leaves, every intersecting road requires a roundabout and a driver requires a navigator. At least, I did. So Carmen read the map and coordinates it with the village names on the signs at the roundabouts. The problem that we became aware of is that the village names are the next ones down the road and not necessarily the large, more well known town, down the road. We eventually got on to the main highway that would take us to our destination, 50 miles away to...