Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2009 11:10:50 -0230
Reply-To: Joy Hecht <jhecht@ALUM.MIT.EDU>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Joy Hecht <jhecht@ALUM.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Antwerp to Rabat: Trip report
In-Reply-To: <809566.74170.qm@web44708.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
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It sounds like a wonderful excursion, Malcolm! Are there photos somewhere?
Joy
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 10:40 AM, Malcolm Stebbins <mwstebbins@yahoo.com>wrote:
>
> 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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