Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2009 06:10:40 -0700
Reply-To: Malcolm Stebbins <mwstebbins@YAHOO.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Malcolm Stebbins <mwstebbins@YAHOO.COM>
Subject: Antwerp to Rabat: Trip report
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For those
of youon the vanagon listserv who might like the background of this trip, you are welcome to read the following
previous posts:
http://gerry.vanagon.com/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0712A&L=vanagon&P=R34218
http://gerry.vanagon.com/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0511b&L=vanagon&F=&S=&P=28603
http://gerry.vanagon.com/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0906a&L=vanagon&F=&S=&P=36732
If you didn’t
just read those reports, then the short story is that I have retired from my
job in Halifax, NS and married a Moroccan woman and I’m moving/retiring to Morocco
(with my van, hence this report to vanagon.com).
To this
end, in early July, I shipped my van from Halifax
to Antwerp ( Belgium ),
and Jamila and I flew up there (from Rabat ) on
July 8th to retrieve the van and drive south, back to Morocco . This turned out to be about a 7 week trip.
It took
only a few hours to get the van out of Belgian customs but we hung around Antwerp and Brussels
(in a beautiful, quaint B&Bs) as Jamila has some friends who live
nearby. Both Antwerp
and Brussels
are wonderfully beautiful cities and well worth a visit.
Jamila had
never been to Luxemburg, so, as we left Antwerp
we headed east to include a day driving through the Luxemburg hills and a day in
Luxemburg city.
To North
Americans, the major European cities are wonderfully close together, and it was
only a few hours drive from Luxemburg to Paris . IMHO one could spend a lifetime exploring
Paris, and we devoted 5 long days of our
lives to “power tourism” in Paris, taking in many of the major museums, art
galleries and of course Versailles and other sights so associated with
Paris. A museum and a metro pass are
well recommended. We had both been to Paris with previous
spouses, but we found much that we had not done there before. For me Paris
always lives up to its reputation.
From Paris , we headed nearly straight south past Orleans, Limoges and Toulouse , arriving at the northern slopes of the Pyrenees
mountain range (that divides France
and Spain ). Here in Foix, when we stopped for gas, I
noticed that the front left wheel was very hot! We spend an hour hunting for a mechanic who could/would look at the
brakes that day. We found a great guy
who spoke French with a wonderful rural accent that really tickled Jamila’s
ears. His diagnosis was that the brakes
were OK and that the heating up of the wheel was a one time occurrence. He must have been right, as, for the rest of
the trip, all was OK.
Having been
reassured that the brakes were OK for the morrow’s drive up and over the
Pyrenees , we spent the night in a campground just south of the small French town of Foix . Again Jamila had never been through the tiny
principality of Andorra, so
we headed up and over the Pyrenees on a
wonderfully twisting 2 lane road, much of it in 2nd gear.
Andorracity is wedged in a valley and we
were lucky and found a parking space right near the city centre and stopped for
a walk around town and for lunch. Jamila,
being a linguist, cocked a careful ear to the local Catalan language (a curious
mix of French & Spanish). We then
stuck to the 2 lane roads and continued south to Barcelona . This is where the trip ‘heated up’ ….. with each day getting well over
40 degrees Celsius for the rest of the trip in southern Spain (This is in contrast to the 18C in the Pyrenees ).
Neither
Jamila nor I had been to Barcelona
so this was all new for us. Again a
museum pass and metro pass allowed us to move about, and enter sights without
having to think about standing in line for tickets, or think about the
costs. Besides the museums etc. one
attraction in Barcelona
is the architecture of a guy named Gaudi. His name could well be the origin of our word ‘gaudy’ but seemingly it is
not.
Leaving Barcelona and after a few hours driving west, we arrived
in Madrid
which again has many world class museums and art galleries. We did not stay in Madrid (no campgrounds as I recall) but just southwest of Madrid is the medieval town of Toledo whose streets still
reflect the Moorish occupation of years past: narrow and winding. Toledo has good train connections to Madrid ,
so every morning we took a short bus ride and then a 30 minute train ride up to Madrid . Our routine was, by now, well rehearsed: Each morning we made 2 sandwiches, and packed some dates, nuts and apples
and a water bottle and off we went. Usually the last day in a city, we would treat ourselves to a restaurant
dinner.
There are
several “must see” cites in southern Spain : Granada , Ronda, Cordoba and Seville . For me the old parts of these cities are magnificent
with the Moorish parts of town and the mix of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam….. sometimes within the same buildings. Again Jamila had never been to these cities so it was all wonderfully
new for her. We devoted several days to
each town and even splurged for a few quaint B&Bs that were located in the
old parts of the cities.
My good
friend Louise reminded us that just east of Granada
are the Sierra Nevada mountains. We took 2 days and drove along the southern
slope of the mountain range through several (what are called) ‘While Villages’
as every building in the towns is painted white.
Here is the obligatory vanagon content: As we
headed back west we had to pass through Malaga
and there we were caught in a traffic jam for one hour, up hill in creeper gear,
with temps of about 45C . I kept an eye on the van’s temp gauge and my
VDO temp gauge and neither indicated overheating. After the traffic jam thinned out, we headed
uphill towards Ronda. As the engine
cooled off (due to normal driving and cooler mountain temps), the Zetec’s Check
Engine light came on. We were high in
the hills and not near any town. We
stopped and unpacked everything. As I did, I could see steam pouring out of the
side of the EMPTY coolant reservoir. Now
the Zetec engine is different than the Vanagon engine in that there is no coolant
overflow jug. As I looked at the steam
pouring out of the coolant reservoir, I was SURE that super heated
‘pressurized’ coolant had melted a hole in the side of the reservoir. I told Jamila this and suggested that we had
a serious problem. As I dug out the code
reader to check if there was some other problem, Jamila tried to suggest that
the hole in the side of the coolant reservoir sure looked like it was manufactured that way. I dismissed her suggestion as, how could
there be a manufactured hole in the
side of the coolant reservoir. So she tried
again to tell me that; I again dismissed her crazy idea. As I was readying the removal of the
reservoir so that we could hitch hike into Ronda to hunt for a Ford dealership
for a Zetec reservoir, one last time she said (with some more authority) “Before
you take it apart, just take a look!” To
humour her, I unscrewed the reservoir so that I could get a good look at the
backside (the side that Jamila could see from the back seat) and sure enough,
it was a manufactured pressure relief hole. Mmmmm Could she be right and I be
wrong… Certainly this time. So we theorized a bit and figured that the
engine overheated during the traffic jam, and then as the coolant cooled, it
shrank in volume to the point that it triggered the low coolant (check engine)
light. So we added about 1litre of water,
and off we went. Over the next few days,
I checked the coolant level a few times but all was OK (Also no air at the
radiator)..
After interesting
visits to, Ronda and Cordoba , it was during
our last stop ( Seville ) that Jamila was called
back to Morocco for some family business. So, we headed south to Algeciras
for the ferry to the Spanish enclave (on Morocco ’s
northern shore) of Cebta/Ceuta where we crossed the border into Morocco . We spent 2
weeks in Tetouan visiting with Jamila’s family while the siblings oversaw to
the sale of their (late) parent’s family home. So now we are in Rabat (our final
destination) and we have a lot of work to do to get a residency permit for me
and registration for the van.
I’ll soon
get around to posting photos, but these will be tourist photos (of Jamila &
me) and not ‘vanagon’ photos. If you
want photos of these places, I suggest that you download (the free) Google
Earth, as when you enter ‘ Paris ’ it will fly
you there and there are zillions of photos of the Eiffel Tower .
I had
visited nearly all of the sights/sites/cities on this trip with my late wife
Patricia; and Jamila had visited many sights with her former husband; so there
were many bittersweet moments for both of us.
For those
of you who are still reading, the trip stats are:
Total
Kilometres:about 5,000
Total cost: about
CDN$8,500 (not counting shipping the van from Halifax
to Antwerp )
Total days:
55 (for about 150 CDN$/day)
We use the
Lonely Planet guide books and find them well worth the cost.
Also, I
should put in a plug for the Bostig Zetec conversion. The engine worked perfectly and once even told us when the coolant was low.
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