TRAVELLER’S JOYS IV – SPANISH PYRENEES
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007May 3, 2007
With less than 72 hours to departure, it seems a good time to open my travel blog again. I don’t remember much about formatting etc. so this may be a mess, but will try to bungle along.
As indicated in the title it is off to Spain again this year. It was a toss up for a while between completing last year’s run to Atlantic Canada and the Pyrenees, but the clinching factor was the discovery of a budget flight to England out of Hamilton. It is with FlyGlobeSpan, a Scottish airline, that up until two days ago was flying in and out of Toronto. The Hamilton departure saves me a couple of hours of travel time getting to the airport and avoids the congestion of one of North America’s busiest terminals. Getting to Spain from England (Stansted) and then back again is with Ryanair. My initial calculations of the cost of return air travel was under $500 Cdn! It crept up by the time I booked but was still well under $600.
I have not flown with either airline before so it could be an interesting experience. Making connections without having to overnight in England was a concern especially on the return, but I allowed four hours minimum for each connection and will keep my fingers crossed. By the way I fly into Santander on the Bay of Biscay and out of Girona on the Costa Brava. Apart from hotel reservations in Santander and Girona, I have no commitments for the whole 30 days.
Places of interest include Picos de Europa, Bilboa, San Sebastien, Pamplona, Jaca and Besalu. I expect to get in a fair bit of hiking along the way but may stay in one spot more than has been my custom.
Many of the lodging and eating establishments that I tend to patronize do not accept credit or debit cards so my practice was to get cash from ATMs on a regular basis. A couple of month ago my bank announced that there would be a 2 1/2% surcharge on foreign exchange transactions through ATMs in addition to the five bucks service charge. I had seen mention of cash cards as being a better solution than travellers cheques but found only two being offered in Canada. Visa has one sold through CAA but their service charges didn’t make it much (if any) cheaper than my bank. Custom House (a foreign exchange business) started issuing cash cards in February with much better rates so that is the way I went, with my debit card as a backup. Soooo, besides untried airlines I am also relying on an untried financing source.
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