Planning “the BIG trip”

Okay guys, I feel like I have to write about this… I am so excited!

A few weeks ago, me and Ula planned to go travelling during Easter Break (from 28/3 – 8/4). We don’t have school and want to leave Gandia to see the wider world (or at least Spain and surroundings)… But we’re on a budget. So we were planning to do hitch hiking and couch surfing.

HITCH HIKING: “to travel by standing on the side of the road and soliciting rides from passing vehicles; to travel by soliciting free rides along a road.”
COUCH SURFING: ” the practice of moving from one friend’s house to another, sleeping in whatever spare space is available, floor or couch, generally staying a few days before moving on to the next house.”

Me, couchsurfing and hitchhiking from Barcelona to Valencia, earlier this month.

Anyway, we started talking about it with other people and noticed that a lot of people were interested in our itinerary. We planned to go to the South of Spain and Gibraltar, to continue via the South of Portugal to Lisbon and Porto. From the north of Portugal, we would continue our roadtrip back to Valencia via Madrid.

We ended up finding some friends from France that were here with their car and now we will go with a car, filled with 5 persons. 🙂 So we won’t be hitch hiking or couch surfing BUT we will be road tripping and staying in very cheap hostels where we booked dorms.

ROADTRIP: “A road trip is a journey via automobile, sometimes unplanned or impromptu, away from home. Examples of road trips are traveling across state or country by car. A road trip must be a long journey, at least three hours away, and must cover a long distance.”
DORMS: “A dormitory, often shortened to dorm, is a residence hall consisting of sleeping quarters or entire buildings primarily providing sleeping and residential quarters for large numbers of people, often boarding school, college or university students.”

The budget is set on €100 for fuel per person, €100 accommodation per person. We will drive 3000 km and sleep 8 nights in different places.

We will go from Gandia to Alicante to Granada. There we visit the Alhambra (and yes, we bought tickets in advance for this!). After sleeping in Granada, we continue our trip to Malaga, but we sleep in Ronda, in the beautiful region of Andalucía. The next day we cross the border to Gibraltar where we can experience some English life and enjoy the most southern point of Spain. Day 4 we will go via Sevilla to the border with Portugal and we hope to reach Albufeira, in the south, as soon as possible: there is some wonderful beach there. On day 5 we reach Lisbon, where we stay 2 nights to do some citytripping. On our way to Porto, we will try to hold photostops in Sintra and Fatima, and do some quick pilgrimage. And after one night in Porto, we go one night to Braga, another beautiful Portugese city. Finally, on sunday we drive back lots of kilometers from Portugal to Valencia, but we will do quick stops in Salamanca and Madrid. It will be the most amazing trip I ever did in Europe, but definately also very exhausting!