Well we thought we were going to head east towards Provence, but instead we found ourselves in Spain. We realized we were really close to Spain this morning, and decided why not. So tonight we are parked up on a ocean front spot in a campground with at least 400 other campers.
From our site you can see the town of Rose about 400 yards away. We decided we were going to have a nice Catalan dinner there. About 3pm we decided to walk down to town to scout for a dinner choice and discovered there is a river between us and the town that you cannot see from the campsite. Usually these rivers are pretty shallow where they meet the sea so Ron thought we could cross over, but then we watched a pretty tall fellow wade up to his chest crossing over. Well there must be a bridge, so off to the office to find out how far. From here it is two kilometers up the road, and then two kilometers back to the town, so the round trip to town would be five miles. We had a nice dinner sitting outside François, and will have a nice Catalan lunch tomorrow.
The contrast between the two border towns could not have been more different. The French town had incredibly tight roads with everyone trying to squeeze by each other at 5km, probably the most stressful 1km of road Ron has driven, in Spain a wide four lane road thru town, our first impression of Spain was really positive.
Ton has come up with a name for our trip, France Backcountry avec François. So far on this trip about 90% of our travel has been on what the French call D roads, these are roughly a cross between state highways and county roads in the US. Some of the roads have been one lane tracks where when you come across another car someone looks for a place to pull over and let the other car pass. The French handle this really well. Ron is still playing with the preferences on the GPS to try to avoid these roads, but since the speed limits are the same on a D road whether it is a one lane track, or a good two lane road with shoulders, our GPS has sent us into some interesting places, and often insists on sending us thru the center of small villages when there is a perfectly good by-pass that is 200 or 300 yards longer. Ron is going to have another go at the settings tonight to see if we can still stay on D roads without some of the really small roads we have been down.
