RV Travels in Europe and North America
Travelintiger
Travels in the Catalonian region of Spain.
There is nothing much to write about today. The weather forecast was for rain all day, and they were right. We shifted about 90 KM’s to a campground north of Barcelona where we plan to spend a few days exploring Barcelona once the rain stops.
After the drive we settled in for a maintenance day, did some laundry, bought some groceries, and listened to the rain pound on François. Tomorrow will be more interesting.
Tonight we are parked at a winery called Cellar Battl Artcava. We are little bit southwest of Barcelona. This area is known for a sparkling wine called Cava.
We had booked a visit to the largest producer of Cava in Spain called Codorniu, it has been in business since 1541, and is still owned by the 18th generation of the original family. We both woke up early and even though it was only a couple of hours to the winery we left pretty early, and sure enough arrived very early for our 330 pm tour. After looking at our options we decided to head into one of the larger towns nearby to see if we could knock out some laundry. That did not happen, but we did find a Lidl which is Ton’s favorite grocery store here.
After spending some money in Lidl we headed back to the winery and still had some time to kill so, so we settled in and did some reading. Finally we went in and had the light lunch we had scheduled, we met a couple from Austin who were touring Italy and Spain by car. We swapped stories about wine regions before beginning the tour.
We have been on a lot of wine tours but this one was unique. This is an industrial sized winery and they have the capacity to produce one million bottles in a year, though last year they “only” made 600,000 bottles. Around 1911 they focused exclusively on Cava which is a sparkling wine. The tour focused on their storage caves which are about 90 feet underground and according to the guide cover 13.5 km’s of tunnels. To prove the extent of the tunnels at one point they loaded us all onto a train and drove us around the tunnels for about 10 minutes. They are really vast. The wine was good, but we still are not great fans of sparkling wines.
After the tour we moved over to Cellar Battl Artcava which is supposed to be located 5 minutes from the source of the original vineyards in Catalan, so it is the Cava (winery) closest to the origin of wine here.
We have been in Catalan for a few days now and are beginning to get even more confused with romance languages. The signs here are in Catalan and Spanish. Catalan unlike Basque is a romance language, but it is as different from Spanish as French or Portuguese is. As an example wine in French is Vin, in Spanish is Vino, and in Catalan is Vi. There has been a bit of a political uproar as the Catalan parliament voted to leave Spain last year, but driving around there is no sign that anything is happening to move that forward or to stymie it, but of course we cannot read the signs in Spanish or Catalan!
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.
