Abandoning air travel - Spain and Portugal by train, intro ...

*Before departure

Above: Martha Jungwirth, part of the Australidelphia series, photo by MH taken in the Guggenheim September 2024.

Excruciating flights to and from South Africa in February 2024 pushed us towards thinking again. Friends had recently done the Interrail "thing" and regaled us with its delights. In some trepidation we decided to give it a go. 

The whole thing almost collapsed in a costly mess at the eleventh hour; more of that to come later on in this episode. First the painstaking planning.

Planning the itinerary

A broad outline was key to the planning process. Where would we go? This was kind of essential but not too much of a conundrum after we'd barely scratched at the surface of North-Western Spain a couple of years previously. There had been so much more to explore. But more sane people than us had routinely settled for air flights or shifting their cars by ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao or Santander. Why would we struggle across England and France by train just to get to first base (i.e. Donostia - San Sebastián).

​Initial investigations suggested it may not be that much of a struggle at all ... just 8 hours from London to Hendaye and then a short hop on a local train to Donostia. Of course it wasn't quite that simple but nonetheless doable with a few contingencies like an overnight stop in Paris in Montparnasse. 

And so it was that we took the plunge and invested in two first class Interrail passes. These allowed us to choose how many months and the number of days of actual travelling we would need. We went for two months and 10 days. As it turned out we would've got by with one month and fewer travelling days but we were risk averse and could've saved a few hundred Euros there. C'est la Vie!
​ 
Turned out that on closer inspection and with more recent maps we'd have to give up on plodding across Spain's Northern Coast and any of our desires crossings of the Spanish/Portuguese borders. The former because the trains making this journey appeared to stop at every minor station along the way and the latter because of Spain's rebuilding the infrastructure on its side.

We did have a fleeting bit of excitement when we discovered a luxury train that traversed the Northern Coast of Spain from Bilbao almost to the westernmost point. This "Transcantabrico[1]" did exactly what we wanted ... get from San Sebastián to Santiago de Compostela with eight days of interesting bits in between. It took an hour or so drooling over the features before we checked the price of a double "room" ... €18,000! And so it was back to the drawing board and a hire car from Bilbao to Santiago.

​The trip gradually came together over the intervening months but ...

Above: (clockwise from top left) At least the food wasn't half bad on Eurostar in Premier; Desperately needed drink in Montparnasse IBIS after a traumatic day; Ibis had one of the more intimidating corridors we'd come across; The station for Spain (or at least Hendaye) at last.

It almost came a cropper - the eleventh hour!

​The first day involved exiting the UK and was planned, it seemed the last "i" had been dotted and "t" crossed. All the tickets, credit cards, my passport and initial currency were safely packed in my handbag. Our taxi to Didcot station, 45 minutes away, arrived comfortably early. We were getting the train from there (via the Underground) to London St Pancras to pick up the Eurostar to Paris.

We settled back in comfy seats with our thoughts while we were wafted to Didcot. Upon arrival <our driver> helped us lift our rather heavy luggage from the car and I went to get my handbag to pay her.

"Where's my handbag?" I asked, starting to panic. It was nowhere to be found.
"You must have left it at home," Shan said, trying hard not to sound condemnatory.
"Can you take me back to Faringdon I asked <our driver>," with my heart in my throat. We left Shan at Didcot. That was a tense return journey in so many ways but <our driver> was a total star, rescheduling her later journeys so that she could attempt to get me back to Didcot in time for a train that might still get us to St Pancras in time. Thankfully my bag was still where I'd carefully left it at home. 
Meanwhile Shan had been busy at Didcot making sure we could get a likely train to make our St Pancras rendezvous... she had done a brilliant job and after shelling out for a triple cab fare we just made it to our London-bound train. Our taxi driver had offered to take us to St Pancras but there was no way she'd make it through the traffic quicker than the train, which, mercifully, did its business with applomb.

Lugging our suitcases through the Montparnasse section of the Metro nearly killed us but we mercifully reached the Ibis and ordered a drink to restore some sanity before flopping into bed in preparation for our rendezvous with the legendary inOui TGV to the Spanish border.

Oh my God we've missed it ...

One of our "must visit" destinations in Northern Spain was Guernica. The town lies in the Basque Country between San Sebastián and Bilbao and we'd been so preoccupied with how we were going to get from the one to the other that we had an itinerary hiatus that we only recalled after we were too far along our journey to rectify the situation. A sad omission that we can hopefully rectify on another trip to the Basque Country.

Coming next

This blog is a quick intro to our perambulations across Northern Spain and Portugal. A few follow-up blogs over the next few weeks will expand on our adventures and anecdotes as we proceed through some of the choice delights (and one or two challenges) that the Iberian peninsular has to offer.

[Endnotes]:

1. eltrentranscantabrico.com/en/?