"You're not going to see anything!": The Holy Week Road Trip, Part I

Before we get started with the nitty-gritty of the trip itself, it would probably be helpful to those of you reading if I gave some background to this trip of ours.

I studied in Spain during the spring semester. Because I was at an official campus of Texas Tech, we generally followed the academic schedule of the folks back home in Lubbock. The one major exception was that we didn't get spring break. In Spain, Holy Week is a national holiday and the whole country, it seems, takes off. So we traded one week's vacation for another.

Anyone who knows me well knows I love to take road trips. I actually enjoyed the 9-hour cross-Texas trip I had to make anytime I went home to Houston or came back to school. My family has taken road trips every year for longer than I've been alive. When people around campus started discussing plans for Holy Week-- flying to Amsterdam or Ireland, etc.-- I knew immediately that I wanted to take advantage of the long break to see some of Europe by car.

Fortunately, I was able to find two other guys who enjoyed road trips as much as I did: Andres Murguia and Nick Maxwell. Both of them jumped at the idea of taking a week-long, multi-country marathon of a trip. We did our due diligence about driving regulations, found out that it was actually really cheap to rent a car, and got to work planning the trip. We came up with a nine country, nine day tour that would cover around 4000km. Below is the general outline (starting in Seville at the southern end of Spain and going counter-clockwise).

We printed out a ton of Google maps for each day of the trip and bought several country-specific maps to help us navigate.

As the day for our trip approached, I was both extremely excited and very nervous. It was a dream trip, to be sure. But setting out on such a long journey on a continent that you're not familiar with, that you've never driven in, where you don't speak most of the languages-- is pretty intimidating. We weren't the only ones anxious about this plan. My mom was beside herself with worry. Most of our classmates thought a 4000km road trip was their idea of hell. But the people whose criticisms I'll always remember best were those of the professors. The center director, Dr. Inglis, sat us down and told us that we were headed for certain disaster. We'd never be able to make our checkpoints in the allotted time. We'd be driving all day, get to our destination tired, and have to wake up the next morning and do it again. There was no way we could keep up that kind of schedule. We'd get lost. We'd get stranded. We'd drive off a cliff.

And worst of all, we wouldn't see anything anyway.

His challenge (that's exactly what it was!) was enough to push any second thoughts I had out of my mind.