Day 3 - May 5, 2006: Valencia, Puerto Lumbreras

Man, getting to Valencia last night was a cast iron bitch. We were half an hour late landing in Barcelona; it took 25 minutes to get our luggage; and then we had to figure out the rental car situation. Adam and Carlisle were waiting for us by the Hertz counter when we emerged from baggage claim. I was slightly relieved, since my phone wasn't working as I expected it to.

I had originally reserved an Opel Astra wagon, but when the guy behind the counter saw all of our luggage, he very plainly said that there wouldn't be enough room in the car for our luggage. He happily upgraded us to a Renault Espace, which would accomodate our luggage with no problems. The car was really nice albeit underpowered; a 1.9L diesel with a 6speed manual tranny. It had 3 rows of captain's chair type seats that could be arranged in a multitude of different ways. Since we were only 4 people, we didn't need that last row, but the Hertz people wouldn't allow us to leave the back 2 seats with them. Consequently it was like solving some bizarre 3-D puzzle designed by M.C. Escher getting all of our bags into the car. It took an hour. and we had no visibility out of the rear window. Oh, and it was raining, too.

Anyway, we made our way to the Autopista and headed down to Valencia. It took forever to get to Valencia, and by the time we got there and found our hotel, it was 11:30pm. Talk about a long day. We checked into the hotel, found a gyro (Donners in Europe) place still open and were able to get something to eat.

It was agreed that we would sleep in this morning, since we only had to get to Puerto Lumbreras sometime today. I wanted to see the Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias, since that's where BMW does a bunch of their press photo shoots for their new models. It looks awesome in the PR photos, and I wanted to see it for myself.

Our first task was to get the Espace (named "Patsy") out of the garage. That was quite a challenge. It took an hour to extricate Patsy from her stall, and the only one able to get her out was Angela. We discovered that Patsy really didn't have quite enough torque to get up the ramp, so we had to give her a running start.

Parking at the "Ciutat" wasn't nearly as challenging, since we parked in a garage for the main shopping mall where the spots were almost as big as back in the USA. The Ciutat itself was amazing. The architecture was simply astounding. You just don't see buildings like that in the states.

After a quick bite to eat in the food court, we got underway. Initially, we took "B" roads, but became evident that it would take us quite a while to get there that way, so we just hopped on the Autopista and rolled in to our Parador in Puerto Lumbreras around 6:30 or so. It's not one of the historic Paradors, but it's nice nonetheless. We ate dinner in the hotel restaurant, since the Parador restaurants are supposed to be very good. This one didn't disappoint.

As a whole, Puerto Lumbreras is nothing to write home about. Of course, it was never intended as anything more than a place to stay while we drove down to Andalusia. There's a supermarket right across the street from the hotel, so we're going to get some breakfast food (read: chocolate croissants) there in the morning and have breakfast on the road to Ceuta.