Thursday 25 July 2013

The last day in Madrid was strictly for business. We cleaned the apartment and caught a metro to the airport. The flight to the United Arab Emirates seemed endless, but it was nothing compared to the next leg to Sydney. Susie and I both disappeared into our noise-cancelling headphones, and broke our own record for watching movies back to back. Never has it been more obvious to us that our home lies on the other side of the world from Spain and Portugal.

Our journey had lasted a total of 75 days, including the days spent flying from Sydney to Europe and back. It took us from Amsterdam to Tilburg and Breda in the Netherlands; through Temse and Ghent in Belgium, and then on to Paris, where we spent 5 days.

We then travelled for the next 30 days though Spain on a journey that began in Barcelona (7 days) and proceeded through Valencia (3 days), Cuenca (2 days), Madrid (3 days), Zaragoza (3 days), San Sebastian (3 days), Bilbao (2 days), Cudillero (4 days), and Santiago de Compostela (3 days).

This was followed by 14 days in Portugal, starting in Porto (3 days), then moving on to Nazaré (3 days), Lisbon (4 days), and the Algarve region (4 days).

We completed the journey with an additional 16 days in Spain, travelling from Seville (7 days) to Córdoba (3 days), and back to Madrid (6 days).

We stayed with relatives and in hotels and pensions; but most of our accommodation consisted of apartments booked through AirBnB. We hired a car for two road trips: one across the northern coast of Spain from Bilbao to Santiago de Compostela, and the other in the Algarve region of Portugal.

This blog is now complete. I have written a total of 47,500 words. The average entry is 630 words long. I will now retro-fit some photographs to illustrate earlier entries. After this task is complete, this blog will remain a permanent online record of our journey through Iberia in 2013.