Having developed a growing aversion to cold, miserable, damp weather, Janet and I took the decision this year to avoid a fair chunk of the raw English winter by spending it in southern Spain, where we felt we could possibly shun the sheer unbridled misery of the dank, cold stuff that even the temperate south-east of England is liable to throw at us. So we booked a ferry crossing from Portsmouth to Santander for mid-January (we have given up flying about 20 years ago in order to salve our environmental consciences) and a return ticket almost 6 weeks later. Around that I designed a holiday, booking accommodation, rail tickets and a hire car. All of this was massively outside of our comfort zones, which had shrunk considerably since the start of the pandemic, but it all worked beautifully and we think we will do the same next year.
Our outward trip began on 16th January, when we caught a train from Prittlewell to Portsmouth. We didn’t really know what to expect, and travelled several hours earlier than we need have done, and spent an awful lot of time in the ferry terminal (I sometimes wonder if it’s called a “terminal” because so many people die of boredom there). However, we were finally invited to board at about 10.45pm, for an 11.30 departure, and off we went.
Portsmouth to Santander takes somewhere in the region of 30 hours, so we had to spend two nights on the ferry on the way out. It’s actually a very civilised way to travel. I have to say that I was somewhat concerned that being on a pretty luxurious boat for all of that time might actually involve a comparable carbon footprint to flying, but I did a bit of reading and found that our ferry, the Santona, the most recent of the Brittany Ferries fleet, runs off liquified natural gas (methane) and that some of it (I confess that I don’t know how much) is bio-methane manufactured in a digester in Galicia, so it’s considerably more environmentally friendly than a diesel-powered ferry would be.
Ferry travel is really rather good. You have an entire day just to laze around. I paid the necessary €25 for unlimited internet access (I can’t do without my WhatsApp chats and daily puzzle fixes, you know) and we interspersed reading the iPad, eating, following the ship’s progress across the Bay of Biscay, going out on deck to be blown around, and observing passing shipping and finding out what it was on marinetraffic.com.
We arrived in Santander a little before 8am, and it was still dark. We’d had a mini-breakfast on the boat at around 7, so after a wander around the port area, where we were treated to a perfect, cloudless dawn, we found the station where our train to Madrid was due to depart shortly before 2pm.
We found the station – or one of them. Santander effectively has two stations right next to each other, as Spain uses more than one gauge of railway line. We had found the narrower gauge station which is used for local services, but the high speed, long distance trains are on a wider gauge and eventually we were pointed to the right place. Neither of us speaks Spanish so the Google Translate app was earning its keep.
Our train to Madrid was an Alvia, a second-tier high-speed train that is capable of 250kph. When we set off, though, we seemed to be travelling remarkably slowly and I found out later that the first 100 kilometres or so are on a single-track railway which makes its anfractuous southward progress between high peaks and steep valleys. It’s very picturesque, but sometimes the train simply has to stop at a passing place and wait for something that is coming the other way. Thus it is that the 350ish kilometres to Madrid takes something over 4 hours, even though the train does actually reach pretty close to its maximum speed in the second half of the trip, when it passes through Europe’s longest tunnel, bar two or three in Switzerland.
We arrived in Madrid more than 50 hours after leaving home and didn’t really have the energy to do anything other than find our hotel, which, by careful planning, was only a short walk from the Chamartin station. We had a brief rest, and then enjoyed our evening meal in the hotel’s restaurant.