Spain and France, 1st – 5th December 2015
This post is a couple of weeks behind after I didn’t get it finished while on the ferry back to England due to our crossing being in terrible sea conditions during Storm Desmond; more on that in the next post. Back in the UK we didn’t stop getting on with working through our list of jobs and had my PhD graduation to attend, so we’re catching up to resume normal service again now we’re back on the road.
Back to where we left off...With being in northern Spain we’d been thinking we would get a ferry from Bilbao or Santander to Portsmouth for the convenience, less driving and less mileage covered, but in the end decided we couldn’t face paying the extra cost. I set up a spreadsheet to calculate the fuel and ferry costs for the alternative routes, which showed that even with the extra fuel to travel 700-odd more miles up through France it was projecting the cost to be basically £200 less to go via Dover or Dunkirk. Putting it another way it would’ve cost over twice as much, and it would have used up one week’s worth of our budget each way, which realistically should cover two weeks living costs down in Portugal in winter. So by doing the Dover route both ways will effectively mean we can afford an extra two weeks to a month’s travel! Additionally we’d only be losing about a day in extra travelling, aiming to get across France in two days. This therefore is the option we went with, so the majority of this five day period was spent travelling north.
