(Parts 1 and 2 can be found here and here, respectively.)

Night was falling fast: by the time we gave on the bathroom and got on the highway, it was already dark. I gingerly tiptoed past a speed trap, all the while keeping my eye on the Suzuki Vitara that, mercifully, didn’t bother pursuing us. Just as well, too; I wouldn’t know what “do you know how fast you were goin’?” sounded like in Spanish, anyway.  Speed cameras, which the GPS system thoughtfully warned us about, were everywhere: on the tops of tunnels, in the bushes on the median, mounted secretly in the back of vans, underneath Avatar billboards (I saw 15 in one day—5 of which were at the same bus stop). I slowed down to 50kph every time the annoying beep emanated from the dashboard, but soon gave up as soon as I saw traffic flying past us. Evidently the Spanish have far less to lose when it comes to racking up traffic violations.

Eventually we were stopped by a tollbooth, and being late after a long day and not wanting to dice it up with traffic, we pulled into the first lane we saw.

There was no booth here—no tollbooth collector, no ticket dispenser or digital readout showing how much we owed. Nothing was on the machine except a small card reader, which we gawked at like it was the monolith from 2001. “What the hell is this?” My dad asked out loud to nobody in particular. “Where do you put the money in?” He fumbled through his wallet for a credit card then slowly stuck it into the slot. The LCD screen swore at us in a string of gibberish. He tried it again, magnetic reader up, to the left, to the right, and down. No reaction.

I looked behind us. Three cars had queued up behind us, part of the evening rush. Next to us, cars were whisking through their toll lanes with aplomb. In front was a solid arm barrier. It was a flimsy-looking piece, mounted by a mere two bolts, a little above hood level. Slamming on the gas and lurching forward would be quick and effortless. Couldn’t do much damage to our car, right? Sure, they might catch us on videotape, but by the time they got around to tracking down the paperwork we’d be 39,000 feet over the North Atlantic. “Go for it!” I suggested, half seriously. What other option did we have?

“Do something!” my mom yelled, leaning forward and slamming her hand on the emergency blinker. Almost instantly, the drivers’ angry faces were placated as they slowly shuffled out of the toll lane, in reverse. There was no honking or rapid-paced cursing. We joined them in backing out of the lane, then dashed across three lanes in almost perpendicular fashion, swinging the car around to another lane with an actual human being in it. In Massachusetts we would have been tarred and feathered as a warning to others.

Dramatic highway ordeal over, we stopped at a rest area that sold beer, condoms, hardcore pornography, Bacardi Breezers, and the entire Twilight series in paperback.

We bought none of those things. Instead, we drove past Barcelona and headed straight for the airport, our road tour of southeastern Spain over, away from the crowds and into the magnificent scenery that I didn’t bother photographing. Finding a gas station proved to be tricky: we circled the same roundabout 4 or 5 times, up and down a grid of rainy streets in a nondescript industrial park, underneath the massive upright tanks of the nearby Estrella Damm brewery. I didn’t even know why I was in such a rush to get rid of it. We had the car until noon the next day, evidently.

And it wasn’t a particularly bad car, either: sure, it was painfully slow, and downshifting on the notchy gearlever to wring that extra hidden burst of speed soon grew tedious, but I expected as much from a car with less displacement than a Big Gulp. It proved to be a surprisingly comfortable highway cruiser, riding smoothly and competently fending off crosswinds, 20-wheel trucks and mad Peugeots. After 350 kilometers, the fuel gauge had barely registered a dent. And since buying gasoline in Europe involves a second mortgage and a firstborn daughter, we were more than grateful for this.

And I could drive it a damn sight better than my old man.

- Blake Rong

Part 1 can be found here.

For about 90 kilometers the highway wound through the open countryside, full of sloping, featureless farmland and terrain that seem to have been transplanted from western Pennsylvania. The novelty of tooling around Europe in a funny little hatchback was starting to wear off, so I turned on Spanish radio for a while. Ever get the impression that foreign languages are spoken at a far faster clip than English? By the time an English speaker hammers out “I’ll have a coffee and an amaretto sour,” a Spanish man will have already explained the plot details of Wuthering Heights and seduced your wife in the process. I tried to decipher some of the verbal barrage machine-gunning through the cabin, and an angrily-driven Peugeot 308, lights flashing, almost plowed into the back of our glacially-accelerating Corsa at approximately half the speed of sound. So I turned the radio back off.

Eventually, we got off the motorway and onto the smaller roads. Here we were just a stone’s throw from France, 40km, a country whose language I could actually somewhat speak. At the very edge of the horizon peered the white tips of the Pyrenees. Underneath them, the rolling plains gave way to squat, squared-off industrial buildings, gas stations and big-box stores: we were driving through a Spanish strip mall. And between the highway and our little resort town, we had to traverse the entire continent’s supply of roundabouts.

“Drive, 200 metres, then enter roundabout. Take the, third, exit. Followed by, a roundabout.”

Despite the signs, Cadaqués didn’t seem to get any closer. Little white houses dotted the base of the mountains like powdered sugar on ice cream. I would build up speed in 3^rd gear, then 20 seconds later slow to 2^nd, circumnavigate half the roundabout, and upshift just in time to frustratingly slam on the brakes for the next one. A Peugeot minivan passed us in a huff, children glaring at me in the back row. This went on for about 20 minutes.

After a while, the flat, featureless highway gave way to an even narrower two-lane road, the last of the side exits disappeared, and the cars slowly thinned out.

It was the sort of driving road car enthusiasts wept over in magazines. The coastal road—the only road into Cadaqués—quickly narrowed, the space between oncoming corners fell to a few feet, rendering every oncoming car a sphincter-tightening moment.  To the right was a sheer 40-foot drop into a tree-lined valley with the guardrail missing in many places. Empty grape vines crossed the hills in neat, evenly-spaced rows, scrounging whatever heat they could extract from the crisp winter air. Beyond the mountains, the Mediterranean stretched out in front of us on the horizon—a tranquil, picture-perfect view of the Old World and the mysteries and the adventures that lay ahead. And then, we got stuck behind a cement truck.

I worked the gearbox furiously between second and third, daring to pick up extra speed, while my mom yelled angrily from the backseat. “DON’T DRIVE SO FAST!” she hollered in that tone mothers get when they insist, almost militantly, on your safety. Only I wasn’t; I was merely keeping the 1.2 liter engine above sea level and with enough power to get around the next corner.

Clearly, the locals knew every corner and could nail every apex with aplomb with the sort of experience garnered only through years and years of imitating Jacky Ickx. The cement truck pulled over at a scenic turnoff to let us pass: us and three cars behind me that had gathered. This included a bright red Volvo 240 wagon that flew up seemingly from nowhere, an inch off my rear bumper—he was goading me to move faster, only slowing to brake early and keep its massive heft in check, keeping pace right behind me in a 20-year old Swedish meatball with the handling properties of a double-wide outhouse. If I obliged, my mother would yell louder and angrier. If I didn’t, the Volvo’s gigantic metal bumper would gladly punt me off the cliff. They wouldn’t find us for days, just a couple of Yank tourists lost in the mountains.

In the end, however, I was relieved of my road-blocking duties by yet another bright red wagon: a nippy little Honda Jazz that had tore past the Volvo at breakneck speed and now had me in my sights. Had he been a less brave man he could have waited for one of the relatively few straights, but he took his chances around the outside corner of a tight right-hander. Here was a man who knew how the game worked. Oncoming traffic was bearing down on him, the corner was blind, off-camber, and pants-wettingly treacherous, but the foolhardy Spaniard could care less.  A gigantic eye-searing tomato streaking past my window, the tiny Honda passed me with a vigor that could have only come from years of practice on these very roads. After he merged back in front of me he gunned it with a shriek, and in three corners he disappeared out of sight.

Screw this. I hung it in 3^rd, leaned back, and enjoyed the scenery.

We slowly found our way into the center of the sleepy fishing town, past the narrow, stone-white buildings and the occasional brightly-colored storefront breaking the monotony. Most of them were closed for the holidays. What stroller-pushing tourists that weren’t already seated at a café were wandering the streets aimlessly. Down the hill, a line of orange-reddish terra cotta roofs dotted the coastline: small roads were cut into the hills and one-garage duplexes sprouted atop. It looked like a scaled-down version of the Los Angeles hills.

I parked the car in the first space I saw. The short strip of rock-strewn sand quickly gave way to the icy Mediterranean. The two sizeable restaurants by the water were packed—understandably—and the lone waiter hurried from table to outdoor table, packed with errant Americans and coffee-swilling fathers—no position to even notice us. Even in the dead of winter the tourists came in droves; they just didn’t stay around very long.

Picasso had stayed here for a summer when he was 29, painting The Port at Cadaques as a reflection of the harbor; though in his famous Cubist style it’s hard to tell at first glance. Marcel Duchamp, the famous French surrealist, honed his passion for chess against the local fishermen, whom he found to be formidable opponents. Salvador Dali proclaimed that he had been “quenched by light and colour” when he visited in 1920—his house today is a museum dedicated to his work.

We didn’t notice any of these things at the time, however, because we were craving seafood. So we went to a restaurant that was all out of it.

“Codfish?” I asked, pointing at the menu like I was hungover at a Denny’s.

“No.” She shook her head slowly.

“Ok, then.” Sardines it is.

“No,” she repeated, shaking her head again, as if she was comforting someone who had just lost a dog.

Surprisingly, however, the enormous plate steamed mussels coupled with gazpacho managed to be filling in a way clams usually aren’t expected to. The bartender hurried over, a lanky, frizzy-haired man who we were told understood English, and enthusiastically showed us the 2008 Don Hugo Tempranillo Rosado we had just dusted off in addition to our pitcher of sangria, diced orange chunks floating merrily on top. We finished our dessert coffees, paid the bill, and ambled about town a bit: my mother took some pictures, and my dad instructed me on the finer points of uphill clutch dumping. The town held no more secrets for us (not that we had tried to uncover any), and we soon left the way we came.

Back on the road, we took a right turn down another scenic drive and promptly ended up in La Port de Selva, a grim little seafaring town with no discernable life whatsoever. The brochure claimed that this was a charming little tourist spot during the summertime, but here in the dead of December it was a grey, lifeless ghost town. Dusty yachts sat naked on the side of the road. Construction zones popped up every 10 feet. Everything appeared a monotonous shade of grey, from the top of the roofs snaking along the mountains to the few cars strewn about the parking lot in front of the communal beach. It was also a town without a bathroom, as I learned from a stone-faced bartender and a supermarket checkout girl, the latter who gawked at me like I had crawled naked out of a storm drain.

At this point, we gave up on the lighthouse (and my bathroom) and started to head back home.

I passed the helm onto my dad, in whom I had supreme confidence in his driving abilities. Here was the man who had taught me to drive, doing loops in the high school parking lot in our 1996 Nissan Sentra XE. He hadn’t flinched when I suggested that his next car (he got bored with cars easily, switching them out every 3 or 4 years) should sprout a third pedal. So I was surprised, to say the least, when he took a wrong turn, backed the car down a slight incline, put it in 1^st and promptly lurched forward into a curbstone with a piercing CRUNCH. Some locals looked up from their Diari de Girona. “I know how to drive manual,” he explained, “I just haven’t done it in 20 years.”

“You better drive,” he then said, hurriedly stopping the car and almost forgetting to set the parking brake.

(Stay tuned for Part 3…)

- Blake Rong

They really like wine in Spain, I had noticed. Walk into any convenience store or side stand and you’ll see racks of the stuff: Rioja, Secastillo, Tinto de verano, Sangre de Toro, in full view and right by the entrance. It pours forth at restaurants with a alacrity normally reserved for Bacardi Breezers at TGI Friday’s. The Mediterranean winds that kiss the tops of the cordilleras form hot, exotic climates, perfect for the ripe varieties of Ribera del Duero, Penedès, and Garnacha grown and bottled under the strict Denominación de Origen system. And that’s before one dives into the world of sherry, porto (from neighboring Portugal) and, of course, sangria and calimocho, the latter a 50/50 split of wine and Coke that reflects the Spanish ingenuity of mixing daring wine-based concoctions.

I may have been imbibing some myself when I conceived the idea at the last possible second. Our travel guide had, tucked away on page 116, a short one-paragraph blurb about a secluded resort town on the coast of the Mediterranean, up the Costa Brava (the “wild coast”) and neatly tucked away from civilization, where the mountains would soar, the wine would flow like waterfalls, the women would be curvy olive-skinned beauties and the roads would be free of diesel Skodas. “Just a short drive north,” our Eyewitness Travel Barcelona guide proclaimed. “One of Catalonia’s trendiest beach towns,” it continued. “The picture-perfect scenery will leave you speechless!”

“It’ll be fun!” I hammered incessantly to my parents, who were busy doing touristy things like fumbling with their maps in broad daylight and scoping out the nearest McDonald’s (of which I was guilty of, but only once). The Barcelona vacation was their idea, and they controlled the checkbook. But I was in charge of the itinerary, and there’s only so much Gothic Olde Worlde streets you can wear out your Skechers on before you complain about how tiny all the cars are and that you really crave a diet Pibb.

Eventually, they capitulated.

So on the fourth day of our whirlwind Barcelona vacation, my parents and I found in our possession an Opel Corsa D with a five-speed manual and a Garmin Nuvi GPS system, courtesy of the nice woman at the Hertz of Aeropuerto de Barcelona who had thrown in the GPS for free and saved us from having to eat each other once we wandered off into the Pyrenees. We would look for Cadaqués, the resort town by the sea, a favorite vacation spot of Picasso, Dali, and Marcel Duchamp. And I had left my license back at the hotel, but no matter: the coast roads of Catalonia were simply waiting to be conquered, atop my mighty 1.2 Ecotec steed.

Midday Barcelona traffic on the AP-7 was cramped but flowing, with a steady, unaggressive stream of traffic merging at 60kph. The motorway passed through central Barcelona and winded its way up north through tunnel after tunnel. Up ahead in one some truck had eaten it and was holding up the right lane: lights, high-vis jackets, the usual roadside panic. As traffic merged, I slowed down, downshifted, and clumsily stalled the car at 40kph in the middle of the crowded tunnel. Traffic piled on behind me. I fumbled for the keys, hearing the starter motor grind itself back into life, jamming the clutch down—stalling it once again.

If this had happened back home in Massachusetts, I would have been executed by firing squad. But no, the Spanish motorists behind me were, for reasons inexplicable to my cold and misanthropic heart, understanding and sympathetic, lining up behind me with nonchalant patience. The air was still with the sound of horns not being pressed. Traffic was still moving on the left lane, and after I had finally remembered the pedal/clutch relationship, the middle lane started moving again. We were finally on our way out of Barcelona proper, and on our way to getting spectacularly lost.

(Part 2 to follow…)

- Blake Rong