Road Trip! ...Costa-Brava-style

On our last day in Spain, we rented a car and drove around exploring the Costa Brava area. To start off with, the day wasn't looking very promising. Basically, every single thing the guy told us when we reserved the car a few days earlier was wrong. The price was higher to add a second driver. We were going to have to drop off the car within working hours, which meant we had an unforeseen deadline on the day. Our hotel Room Number (the only contact information the company had for us) had been written down incorrectly. There were also a couple of things that COULD have been disastrous when we got started. The car was a Standard (which I can't drive... good bloody thing Anna can!). We couldn't figure out how to unlock the gas cap (and the fuel tank was empty when we picked up the car). But, in the end, we got it all sorted and were soon on our way!!

One of the biggest motivators for the road trip (for me, anyway) was the Salvador Dali museum in Figueres. I've always been a fan of his work, and I was excited to see the city he had lived and worked in. Plus, I had read that the museum was designed by him, and that it was called the Teatre-Museu Dali because he wanted it to feel like a theater, in which the audience is a part of the experience and everything is open to interpretation. That's also why there are very few titles or captions on the pieces. You're supposed to decide what it is and what it means. I like that :) I also really enjoyed seeing the vast (and I do mean enormous) range Dali had. He was most famous for his surrealist pieces, but his work includes statue, metalwork, and carving. There are pieces that can only be properly seen when viewed through a mirror, and others that require the translation of a metallic bottle. His pieces that address the human body are varied and stunning. Yep, I'm even MORE of a fan now that I've been there!

After the museum, we wandered around the city of Figueres a bit, and found the building Dali was born in and the hotel he frequented, then headed back to the Parkade to pick up our car. And oh, what an adventure we had there! When we had arrived at the Parkade, which was conveniently located just behind the museum, we thought it was going to be perfect. And the driver in the car ahead of us appeared to just push a button and have a ticket thrust out at him, so we thought it was going to be easy.

Not so much.

When WE got up to the ticket machine, Anna pushed the button...and nothing happened. Well, I should clarify: nothing happened in English. A bunch of Spanish and Catalonian words scrolled across the screen...not helpful. So Anna started jamming every type of payment we could come up with into the slot, to no avail. By this time there were several cars backed up behind us, and we were feeling more than a little stressed. Finally, between the teenaged girl in the car behind us and the parking attendant who came to investigate what the heck was taking us so long, and with the help of a lot of very broken English and a tiny bit of broken Spanish, we determined the problem: the carpark was full!! Good grief. Eventually a space opened up, Anna pushed the button again, and it WAS that easy...

Until later, when we tried to leave and the machine didn't take cash. After trying all of the cards we had between us that SHOULD have worked, we threw my "only works with a PIN" credit card (which thus SHOULDN'T have worked) in as a last-ditch effort...and it worked! Hooray! Off we go!

Our next (and even more disastrous) stop was Girona. Just thinking about trying to navigate through that city brings back feelings of frustration. After driving around for what felt like days trying to find what we wanted to see, and a parking space once we finally found the right area, we were both absolutely DONE with Girona. So we parked the car temporarily (in a handi spot...), got out to snap a few photos (I do have to admit that what we saw was beautiful) and got the heck out of dodge.

At that point, we'd pretty much seen all we wanted to, so as a bonus we drove out to Empuries, an ancient Greek trading post on the coast. It was beautiful! We went for a nice walk along the water, and ended up discovering an adorable little cluster of streets. Actually, one of my favourite parts of the trip were these moments - when Anna made me put my map away and we just wandered and discovered (having said that, I will be ever-grateful for my travel books and maps - we would have been lost without them on more than a few occasions, and we learned a lot of interesting tidbits from them too). I think the best thing Anna and I brought to each other and to the trip was our ability to balance each other in this way.

A few things I noticed about driving in another country:

- Road signs: there are a whole series of signs with black diagonal stripes across them. After 2 days of seeing these and trying to work out what they mean, we decided that they were permitting you to do something, maybe, if you felt like it. And then we saw one that was plain white (with the diagonal stripes). Pardon my language... but...wtf? Does this mean you can do whatever you want, maybe, if you feel like it? Yes, I think so.

- Directional signs: on highways, they give the name of the CITY you're headed towards, not the street or area. I think this is because the cities are so much smaller and quite spread out. So as long as you know the name of the town, you can probably find what you're looking for fairly easily (unless you're in Girona).

- Addresses: when they're written down, the street name is given before the number. Which is actually quite logical. The information appears in the order you'll need it!

- Scenery: it looks completely different when travelling in the opposite direction!! Well no, not really. But that's what our guide book told us, and we thought it was pretty funny!

All in all, Spain was a fabulous trip!! Thanks for coming with me, Anna!