TANGIERS TO BARCELONA

It’s always a pity when you end up in a really good hotel yet spend most of your time there asleep. This was the case in Tangiers. Standing on the balcony I looked out over the various hotel swimming pools seven floors below, looking all the more blue by the dusty beige of the hotel surroundings. Beyond that, a low wall then the beach and sea front stretching back to where we’d left the ferry earlier that afternoon. It was around 7pm and we’d each slept on and off since arriving. Clearing Moroccan customs had proved a little entertaining when one of the event organisers changed intention half way through and after telling us we’d have our passports returned as we cleared customs, then went direct to the hotel, apparently intending to return documents to us there. Trouble is, not everyone got to know about this, leaving about twenty cars stuck at the docks. The scene had begun to turn mildly hostile with a number of Cannonballers aiming their fatigue-induced displeasure at Ahmed the senior customs official. I’d felt a bit sorry for him as he was none the wiser either and was at least trying to help, but same as anyone from this neck of the woods, didn’t like being accused of being at fault and as such was becoming less cooperative, insisting in the end that we just left the quayside. In amongst a stream of angry complaints from others, I gave him a firm handshake and a slow, easy-to-understand “Ahmed! How are you today my friend?!” which settled the air a little. Ahmed then agreed to accompany us to the hotel to discover where our documents were. Simple local courtesy had won, as it would later in our journey home.

            By 8pm the hotel bar was a mumbling jumble of conversation, but all with one theme. Midnight refuels, getting lost in the Pyrenees, grabbing short naps here and there, it was the same who ever you talked to. Although the organisation of getting us here left a lot to be desired (and this too was a common topic of discussion) the atmosphere was overflowing with a real sense of achievement although as we dined the enthusiasm decayed gradually as a need to sleep properly crept up on the majority of those present. By 10pm, we were sharing a final beer with Neil and Jim, the two very down to earth guys in the Porsche 911 who had arrived at Algerciras a whole four hours ahead of us.  Jim had re-mortgaged his house to buy the Porsche, and Neil, with his experience of freelance transatlantic sailing had been an obvious choice of co-driver for an event like Cannonball Run. Some of the supercar crews simply didn’t care who’d made it or how they’d got on, all they were interested in was the fact that yes, just as the Top Gear fact file said, their car would top 150. In contrast, the method by which Jim had financed his car and Neil’s maritime credentials indicated they weren’t with the rest of the ton-fifty crowd, they were genuine enthusiasts, and as such were far more appreciative of our odds and were openly impressed. I was happy to share a few beers with them.

Car 88 contemplating in Morocco

A little light refreshment

            Early next morning, far too soon after the night before, I woke to Wes sounding less than healthy in the marbled bathroom. A violently ill co-driver was absolutely, without doubt THE last thing we needed, although not simply because of time-keeping. I sensed from some of the administrative skills I’d witnessed on our arrival at Tangiers, the event organisers would be totally unprepared for this kind of emergency, but listening to Wes’s groaning from the bathroom, at that moment I resigned myself to the idea of not leaving with the rest of the group and being left to recover in our time of our own accord. Breakfast turned Wes from a pale grey to more of a grey-green colour. Then, after plenty of fluids and the fresh air of the hotel car park as we repacked the car he was, thankfully, right as rain and put his restless night down to the local food and unlucky experience.

            We were aiming for the 11:30 ferry with the fall back of a later one. The majority of cars were ready to go for the early option and around 10:30 we returned to the chaotic docks. Ahmed was on hand again, and made an energetic bee line for the MG when he saw us. Far happier than when we arrived, he’d put on his less crumpled safari suit to see us off and shook my hand vigorously, enquiring if we’d enjoyed visiting his country. We had, and it seemed such a shame to be leaving so soon.

            Another short ferry ride saw us back on European soil again but this time at the port of Tarifa. This added 20 miles to our day but surprisingly no allowance was made on the timing. To the larger cars this was irrelevant but to us it made a difficult day almost impossible. The road book showed 700 miles to cover in 10 to 12 hours. Achievable but no respite from the pace we’d carried from the Channel to Algeciras.

Letting the brakes cool down in the hills of Andorra

Yet another fuel stop

            The first few miles of the route mixed us with local Monday morning traffic along twisty cliff top roads, heading east towards Algeciras from where we could initially retrace our route towards Granada. Our short-cutting on the outbound journey gave us an insight denied to those who’d followed the route to the letter, and the first few hours were easy driving especially once the local traffic faded as the day wore on. Heavy continental trucks slowed the pace considerably though and unlike the previous leg we travelled for lengthy periods in the company of various other Cannonball cars. Beyond Granada the route placed us on single track roads, still populated by large trucks nose to tail. This made progress slower still and slightly sporty overtaking to maintain the pace became almost the norm. The Skoda, Range Rover and a Porsche 944 were behind us and virtually every time I pulled out to overtake, in the rear view mirror I could see these cars darting out from between the  trucks behind us in ad-hoc unison. On a less well populated stretch the Range Rover, playing it’s nitrous-oxide trump card, stormed past us too, with the Skoda and 944 following closely. I’ve no doubt we could have matched their pace more closely if I’d wanted to, but the roads, the overcast weather, our too-brief rest and recuperation; all in all I simply wanted to take it easy for a bit.

            A few miles on and the drawback of propelling a large car at speed was demonstrated as we breezed by a petrol station where a familiar-looking Range Rover, Skoda and Porsche 944 were queued up for fuel. We couldn’t help laughing out loud and gave the thirsty hares a cheeky fanfare on the car horn to declare our minor victory in the name of tortoises everywhere.

            A little later we returned to wide, bland motorways and numerous other cars caught us up having taken the late option out of Tangiers. It was getting towards dusk and as we neared Barcelona, heavy rain clouds brought in the night earlier than usual. The joviality that had, in our minds at least, shortened the day was gone and weariness was taking over. Once fully dark the heavens opened again and we were subjected to yet more rain, luckily with Barcelona only a couple of hours away if that. Wes was deep in concentration trying to cross-refer the road book to the inner-city map in our European road atlas and although he could follow it so far, he admitted it got to a point where the route we were given simply ceased to reflect the map. With a late night beckoning we just couldn’t face scouting round one of Europe’s larger cities in the hope of simply stumbling across our hotel, so after negotiating what felt like our thousandth toll booth I pulled over briefly for Wes to haul the laptop out from behind his seat. The usual time constraints meant we had to keep moving as he logged on to Autoroute. Following an address-based search he had a simple straight line route to our hotel for that night.

            With navigation now sponsored by Bill Gates, the increasingly dense lights of Barcelona appeared welcoming instead of worryingly busy and with startling, almost suspicious ease we found ourselves on the main drag through the city. This was to be less accommodating than it first appeared. Being ten lanes wide was bad enough but at the first set of very small, very random traffic lights, we received a short notice and graphic demonstration of Iberian road manners as a car on our left turned right across the five lanes of traffic all signed as going straight on. Mixed in with this was the ubiquitous Euro-teenage moped suicide squad and very large buses with concertina sections and half another bus  where Routemasters usually end. After another long day, this sudden fraying of our neat motorway existence was more tiring than anything else that day and we simply couldn’t find the hotel quick enough.

The route book advised us to look out for a tall Eiffel Tower-like structure and although I’d spotted this from afar, the actual route to it was less obvious. It had been dark for hours now, the city streets were noticeably quiet, so without even checking the F’s clock I knew it must have been near midnight. I wasn’t wrong and having glimpsed the Spanish Eiffel, I took a late-night chance and cut the wrong way round a roundabout and drove against the non-existent flow up a one-way street to reach the hotel entrance. I didn’t like the idea of abusing the ignorance tag that accompanied our tourist status, but we couldn’t see any other way to the hotel and had run out of patience to go looking. After a day made unnecessarily long by poor directions within the city, the event administration at the hotel was soul-destroying with no single person in control, no accurate timings being given and cars filling every inch of pavement. Out of sheer need to get fed, watered and to sleep, we checked ourselves in virtually independently and sorted our own parking. The one twinkling star in this otherwise black night was the arrival of the Range Rover, the Skoda and the 944, still travelling as an unlikely trio, a whole fifteen minutes after us, but equally unimpressed with the labyrinthine location of our night stop. Mind you, we’d been given the same instructions and still beat them.

            A short minibus ride away and we were dining at Barcelona’s Hard Rock Café in the company of the two Johns from the Aston Martin. Their British icon had been misbehaving and misfiring constantly leading one of the Johns to describe it as a PR-mocking “eleven and a half cylinders of genius”. They were keen to stress that unreliable though it had been, under no circumstances would their car carry the sponsorship decals of the Japanese import garage sposnoring the event.

“But my dear chap,” they’d told the event manager in Bonded tones, “This is a British motorcar”

Q would be proud.

I secretly admired their overt yet subtle patriotism, willingly confessed at risk of being disqualified for not applying all the “agreed” sponsorship graphics and I decided there and then that the F would also become Jap-free the next morning.

            Even before all the lights were out in the hotel room, Wes was out of it, no doubt mentally exhausted from some of the most difficult navigation we would see. I hadn’t felt this tired in a long time either, and my heavy shoulders sagged as I looked at my watch. We hadn’t over-indulged at dinner by any means but it was 3am already.

Breakfast was just four hours way.