The trip ain't over until the fat lady sings, they say. And so our European travel got a sort of encore, at least on a mental level, when the Spanish police contacted me with a speeding ticket! I admit I was kind of driving pretty fast in Spain and I was pretty surprised there didn't seem to be cameras anywhere. Doh! Wrong assumption! Well that's was 100 worth of fun I guess, assuming there won't be any other ones heading my way.

In fact it is probably good that we were renting a lousy Peugeot 207 which didn't run much faster than the 146km/h stated in the ticket. On 120km/h area I kind of wonder why they even bother sending me a ticket to another country but I guess speeding is speeding regardless.

The address on the envelope was so totally and completely incorrect that it's a small miracle the letter ever found me. I guess the postal service is Finland is pretty good, or it might just be that there aren't that many people living in Finland so as long as the name is correct they'll find a way to track you down!

Combined with the 156.40 EUR parking violation and towing fee we had to pay in Torremolinos, this makes our little trip quite nice for the state of Spain.

Actually, I noticed at least three highway cameras taking photos after we crossed over to France. The roads in France are just amazingly good and the speed limit on rainy weather is only 110km/h which was almost impossible to keep. Basically this means there might still be more tickets heading to our way, but fortunately that time I was driving a Spanish rental car (still the same 207) though so perhaps it will get too tricky to actually track me down, at least I hope so...

I haven't actually paid this yet but I'm guessing I probably should... does anyone know what happens if I just ignore it? Will I get arrested and fed to bulls the next time I arrive Spain or something like that? It's not so much the money but just the thought of having to figure out exactly how to send the money to the Spanish authorities makes my head hurt.

The positive outcome of this ticket is that it made me read through this blog again which brought back some very nice memories. Spain is a lot of fun, a great country to visit. Unfortunately I probably won't be returning soon as we still have the rest of France, then Italy, Greece, etc. to go through... and besides I guess we'll have to wait until the baby is at least one year old before hitting the road again.

Until then... keep readin' my other blogs!

Oh, and Wen wanted me to point out that the ticket and all the text included is actually in Spanish so I am not 100% sure what it actually says. It's a ticket, that I can see, but if there are any conditions, deadline, penalties, etc.,... no idea.

I know New York is not in Europe... but in any case, I made a quick visit to Manhattan over the weekend. I've never been to New York before so it was exciting for me!

The first thing to notice in New York is the JFK airport. Out of all the airports I've been to around the world, JFK must be the worst. It is huge, of course, but it's unbelievably messy and there always seems to be construction going on where ever you go (I've had connecting flights through JFK many times before). Most big cities use their airport to create a good first impression for the arriving visitor but in the case of JFK the effect is almost the opposite...

I took a bus from JFK to Grand Central Station in Manhattan. The bus is reasonably cheap, $15 USD compared to $45 USD for a cab, and gives you a better chance to look around.

As big as Manhattan is, it's at the same time surprisingly small. You can walk to a lot of places, which was a nice surprise. The yellow cabs seem like the de facto standard of moving around in the city when the distance is a little longer. The cabs are everywhere so it's very easy to pick a ride when you need to.

After I arrived to the Grand Central, I needed to get a hotel room. My whole trip was sort of unplanned and especially unorganized so I arrived without accommodation! Surely a place like Manhattan would be full of hotel rooms. A business mecca like that would definitely have rooms available on a weekend, when businesses are closed... right?

Wrong! The entire island was sold out! I went through probably 20 hotels, with prices ranging from couple hundred to couple thousand a night... with nothing available! Not sure if something special happened or if this is typical in the New York weekends, but there was not a single room that I could find on Manhattan.

The good thing about the hotel room search was that I walked from Grand Central to Central Park and saw a lot of things in between. The city seems surprisingly clean and safe. It reminds me a little bit of Hong Kong, just much cleaner. The long straight streets are really amazing. What a car drivers dream it must be!

Tired of the walk I sat down for a coffee at Borders in Columbus Center near Central Park. They have wireless internet so I had a chance to talk to Wen... who had an interesting idea - I could go to Chinatown and buy some groceries on the way home. She said the Chinatown in Flushing is supposedly pretty good. This solved my accomodation problems - there happened to be a plenty of hotel rooms available around Laguardia airport - right next to Flushing.

Eventually I ended up in Holiday Inn. Not a big difference really, all of the hotels in the area seemed nice and were about the same price per night. I was really tired so I just had a quick dinner at the hotel restaurant (called Pine, but it was a pretty obvious clone of Macaroni Grill) and went to bed.

Next morning I wrote down a shopping list - in Chinese! I didn't know if the people in Chinatown would speak English, so I asked Wen show me how to write a list in Chinese instead. It turned out I was right - mostly people didn't speak English. My list worked very well though, it seems I managed to write everything correctly!

Chinatown in Flushing was a nice experience. It was kind of like traveling back to China. Everything was there, including a lot of Chinese people. I didn't check out any of the restaurants but the supermarkets feature a nice selection of Chinese goodies, including fresh veggies. Having done my shopping I still had some time left so I decided to return to Manhattan.

Flushing is pretty well connected and the train tirp to Manhattan took only about 15 minutes and costs just five bucks. In any case, this time I ended up at Penn Station (which turned out to be short of Pennsylvania Station... imagine that!) and right at Madison Square Garden. This famous arena was one of the places I really wanted to check out!

From MSG I proceeded to south corner of Manhattan to take a peak at the Statue of Liberty. I didn't have time to take a boat so I could only see it from the distance, but at least I've now seen it!

A short walk from the Hudson River coast I found another place of interest - the World Trade Center site. The towers are gone but the signs of destruction are still visible. Freedom Tower is going to go up there, but right now the whole area is just one huge construction yard.

After this I had to quickly head out back to the JFK. I ended up being pretty late and was greeted with lines so long it's not even funny. I walked past the line to ask if I would still have a chance to make it to the flight and somehow accidentally got through without waiting.

Apparently all the people in the line were waiting to get to the counter but I didn't have any luggage so I could check myself in by myself using a computer! I thought I was smart and lucky, but then my self-generated boarding pass was not acceptable at the security gate. I had to go back and get it "stamped"... well, this would have normally meant standing in line to get to the counter after all. A little bit of talking and some good luck, and I was able to walk past the line for the second time and made it to the flight after all!

Click for the photos to see larger versions and go check out my albums! There's about 150 more photos from New York!

I learned one thing pretty quickly in France - you better follow the speed limits on the highways. There are cameras everywhere, quite unlike Spain, so you just can't speed. Fortunately most of the highways have a pretty high limit of 130 km/h but even that is hard to maintain sometimes when the road is wide and in a good condition!

I was a little surprised the Mercedes didn't seem to have cruise control. All I could find was a top speed limiter which you can set to 130 and then that's how fast you can drive. I used it for a while but it turned out quite dangerous. Normally with cruise control, it turns off automatically when you press the either break or the gas pedal. This gives you full control of the car when you need it.

But the top speed limiter obviously can't turn off when you try to accelerate, otherwise it just wouldn't work. This has a major drawback - sometimes you need to be able to accelerate quickly. For example when there's a slower car in front of you (there's a lot of trucks on the French highways which have a speed limit of 90 km/h) in the same lane, you usually want to change the lane to pass it. But if the mirror tells you there's a car on the lane driving faster than you, it'll be a very good idea to speed up when changing lanes to avoid being on the way. If you're using speed limiter, nothing happens when you try to accelerate. More than once this caused a situation where I had to quickly hit the break to avoid the truck in front me. After a while I just turned off the limiter and did my best to stay within the limits...

Another thing to keep in mind is that the highway tolls in France are quite high. Driving from Bordeaux to Marseille was something like 40 EUR. I guess in many places you could avoid using the toll roads but that would mean spending a lot more time too.


The French countryside offers a lot to see, even from a highway. I wish I will have a chance to go back and take a closer look to the numerous castles and old towns we passed.

We ended up spending the night in Marseille. Staying at the local Holiday Inn, I got a glimpse of what the difference is between driving a Peugeot and Mercedes. The hotel reception told me they have a parking garage for 18 EUR per night but that I would be welcome to leave the car in front of the main entrance free of charge if I wanted to...

Marseille looks interesting but the next day we didn't really spend time there. It was just too hard to find parking place and the complex of one way streets just made me go crazy. Cannes is couple hours away so I drove there... but somehow didn't like it a lot. Probably we just didn't know where to go to. We stopped at the beach for a while but it was kind of cold. We checked one hotel but it wasn't too impressive so I decided to continue to Nice as I've been there before.

Nice is nice, easy to navigate and full of beautiful hotels. We ended up at Radisson SAS, but more about that later on...

I had to return the Peugeot to Hertz in Spain so we needed a new rental car. I decided to try out Avis and this time we went for a little bit of luxury - Mercedes A180.

The Peugeot 107 and 207 we drove before were both pleasant surprises and the service of Europcar and Hertz also made me pretty happy. Quite naturally I had high expectations with a Mercedes and Avis with their "We try harder" slogan...

I was greeted with "Sorry sir, we can't find your reservation". Fortunately it turned out to be a mistake of the sales clerk who mixed I with 1 (letter i with number one) when typing in the reservation code. Here's a tip for you, Avis - don't use letters and numbers in your codes that are easily mixed up like zero and O, or one and I...

After signing up the rental agreement (actually I didn't sign it as their computer system wasn't working so they couldn't print the actual contract... but that's another story) I had to take a nice little walk of about 10 minutes to the other side of Bordeaux railway station.

To my shock the car was very dirty. As if it had been driven in rain and then just parked in the garage. I pointed it out to the Avis girl. She didn't say a thing, but she got in the car and drove away. Five minutes later I got the car back, dripping water all over the place. Seems she drove the car through a car wash machine but didn't bother drying it. I looked at her with a blank stare. This is it? She said "it's ok" and walked away.

When I opened the car door I noticed it was dusty and in fact quite dirty everywhere. I've never seen a rental car in such a bad condition (in fact, they've always been perfectly clean) so I walked back to the counter and told the girl the car is dirty on the inside, too. She walked back to the car with me...

"It's not dirty" she said when I opened the door. I pointed my finger at a visible stain on the seat. "We can't do better" was the answer. I asked what she means by that, and she just repeated they can't do any better. Oh, well... I would never accept the car but unfortunately I was in a terrible hurry so I had no option than to just get going...

Later on I took a cloth and wiped out the interiors. All of the dust and actually most of the stains came out easily. I bet the car could be spotless if I had a sponge and some soap or whatever. But Avis - they just can't do better. I guess I also should mention the fuel level was far from full. I guess I've been lucky or perhaps the other car rental companies just care more, but this has never happened to me before, either.

When I returned the car I complained it was really dirty when I received it and that the fuel talk was not full. The reply was "Ok". But then again I am not sure if the person receiving the car understood what I said or not, as I was once again in too much hurry to stay and figure it out...

Since I'm already complaining, let's add another little point. When I was comparing the rentals earlier I always thought Avis was cheaper than Hertz. But now that I actually rented from Avis I learned that they don't include tax in their price while Hertz (at least in Europe) does. So all this time I had been comparing Hertz all inclusive prices to Avis "tax extra", which in France means 19% or so. My mistake for not reading the small print, but I do feel it is more fair to quote the entire price and not leaving anything out...

Ok well... the trip continues, and from now on I have one less car rental company to choose from - this makes the life a little easier I guess!


This seat is as clean as AVIS can. I, however, was able to later wipe it clean with a piece of cloth.


Dust, dust, everywhere...


Despite of AVIS incompetence, the Mercedes A180 was still a really nice car to drive and spacious enough for the two of us and luggage.

It turns out Hertz charges hundreds of Euros extra for returning a car to another country even within the EU (seems about 600 EUR or so!) so I'm currently sitting at the Hondarribia airport on the Spain side of the border, having just dropped the car back to Hertz. The charge this way was just 40 EUR (which is reasonable given that we rented it from another side of the country in Jerez) so it made sense to do the 2 hour drive from Bordeaux.

This also gives me a change to try out TGV trains... now I just need to find my way back to France (the town of Hendaye is just across the border couple kilometers away supposedly) and find the train station. I have almost two hours to find my way so I should be fine!

Bonus points to Hondarribia (aka Aeropuerto de San Sebastian) for having a free wireless access!

Update: I ended up taking a taxi to the Hendaye train station, that seemed like the best option as the weather was a little rainy. The TGV train system is pretty smooth, but one thing to keep in mind - you must book the ticket in advance! Perhaps it's possible to buy a ticket at the station without reservation, not sure, but they're not available in trains and I guess if the train is fully booked you're basically out of luck.

The TGV page is pretty confusing and the booking page is in French so prepare to spend a little while if booking online... Fortunately pre-payment is not necessary but the ticket must be picked up and paid at least half hour before the train leaves.

The train ride was nice a smooth. The seats were comfortable and I almost fell asleep. Unfortunately there's no internet access (I didn't really expect there to be, but technically it would be possible to setup an Orange HotSpot or something similar), otherwise I might consider dropping the car and using trains as my preferred way of moving across Europe. The trip from Hendaye to Bordeaux took 2 hours and 16 minutes, which is about the same as driving a car. Where the train wins in running speed it loses in the numerous stops it makes, basically...

Sorry the photos are not really high quality. I didn't carry a camera today so I was using the Mac's built in web camera to take these shots. It's also a little hard to look natural in the photos when you're trying to hold a laptop as far from you as possible while aiming at something that makes sense.

Oh and as you can see I was pretty tired today...

Tomorrow we'll pick up another rental car, this time from Avis (The first was from Europcar and like I said this one was from Hertz... I'll write a review of their service later on!) and then continue our adventures!

The weather in Spain was pretty cold and rainy in the past few days. The locals we talked to said the weather has gone crazy, this has never happened before. Malaga, Sevilla, Madrid... all should be sunny at this time of year. Whatever the case, we decided to move on!

In search of better weather we took an 8 hour drive from Madrid to France. Driving over the Pyrenees we even went through some snow and the visibility was at times pretty close to zero! Quite far from the warm sunny vacation we had in mind... Having crossed the border the rain just continued so I kept on driving all the way to Bordeaux. Here we've finally seen the sun and enjoyed pretty warm weather!

It's quite amazing how much things change when you move from one country to another. It's also quite surprising how much France has changed since my last visit several years ago. In Spain hardly anyone could speak English, but in Bordeaux I have yet to meet a person who couldn't communicate in clear English. During my last trip to France I remember most people could only speak French!

In Spain I got quite used to things being a little messy. Wiping the dishes with a napkin before a meal (in a restaurant!) became almost a habit. In France however everything is pretty shiny a clean. Wen put it pretty well - how can you have a romantic feeling if you're not clean. Since French are known for being masters in romance it makes sense they also pay attention to such detail...



It was already late night when we arrived Bordeaux. The city is typically difficult to navigate with a car as there are a lot of one way streets. We didn't book a hotel in advance so there was no clear goal where to go to. Then we saw a Holiday Inn - that'll do, I though. However it wasn't so easy to drive there even though it was in clear sight. The center is full of hotels though so it didn't take a long to end up on a street lined up with hotels.

Now, as clean and tidy as the French are, they clearly are lagging behind on the internet access. While in Spain nearly every hotel offered free internet access none of the hotels I've checked in Bordeaux so far do. Some have no internet at all while others rely on services like Orange HotSpots, which offer wireless service for mind blowing 10 EUR per three hours rate. That's basically more expensive than a hotel room if you use it for 24 hours!

The hotel we stayed the first night was quite charming little place, but the real surprise awaited me in the top floor - the elevator didn't go all the way up! Narrow staircase and a piece of heavy luggage is exactly what you need after 11 hours behind the wheel!

Actually we did find a place with good internet connection near the city center after all. Tired of constant traveling we got a place in an apartment hotel, which seems like a pretty good idea. We're gonna rest here for a few days now until we continue our adventures towards Paris!

Oh but one more thing - just as I thought French are so clean... it seems they do have a bad habit. People in Bordeaux let their dogs do their thing on the streets and don't bother picking it up. We were wondering what the weird smell is in the first hotel we stayed at. Wen was sure it's my shoes and made me put them on the balcony for the night! Ha! It turned out it was some dog (or horse, perhaps..?) shit on one of the wheels of the luggage! I only noticed it when I was loading it back to the car... so all night long we were smelling the... anyway, live and learn!

We spent some time in a tiny village of Arcos de la Frontera but there's only so much time we can spend without an internet connection. I was looking for hotels around the area but nearly everything was fully booked! Then I finally found a five star hotel in a town called Jerez de la Frontera that had a room available... We kinda wanted to stay in Arcos but since the internet in our hotel was not gonna get fixed for many more days we just had to get going...


Our new hotel turned out to be quite nice, and so far has had the best service out of any hotel I've ever been to... check out my review of it in the forum's hotels section soon. We also bumped into a fantastic Chinese buffet restaurant called Wok and made friends with the owner and the staff. The original plan was to stay just one or two nights in Jerez and then keep on going to Sevilla, but we decided to stay a little longer.




Today we wanted to visit Arcos once more, to see the famous "bull run" but I managed to pick a wrong turn and we sort of got lost. Well, not totally lost as I knew where we are but in any case there was just no way to make it to Arcos in time.

I basically made a wrong choice at a fork where one way goes to Arcos and the other enters a highway to Sevilla. What's worse, the highway had not a single exit in 24 kilometers!


As we were navigating the way back through small countryside roads there was suddenly a field of "Brassica Rapa", a yellow flower which is used for making vegetable oil. It also happens to have been one of Wen's dreams to find one of those fields (often pictured in wallpapers and scenic photos) so in a way my mistake turned out to be for the best. The bull run would have meant hours in traffic and probably a glimpse of a poor little animal running for his life, while now we got to spend an afternoon in the most beautiful setting...

Tomorrow's plan is to go see the old town of Jerez with some of our new Chinese friends. It's kind of interesting to meet a group of Chinese in a small Spanish town, who speak fluent Spanish but not a single word of English! The owner of the Wok-restaurant is a very interesting person by the way, with a life story worthy a book or a movie. I'll try to write more about him soon, too. Damn, I seem to have a lot of work to do these days. The website needs a whole bunch of new features and the existing stuff needs some fixing too. We also have a ton of photos that need organizing and posting, and we seem to keep taking more faster we can handle. But - we're having a good time, which is what matters after all!

Without planning or thinking we ended up spending Easter in Spain. In this religious country it is quite unlike anywhere I´ve been before! We´re in a small town of Arcos de la Frontera, literally in the middle of nowhere in the Spanish countryside.

Driving here was like driving in a post card or a wallpaper, through the amazingly beautiful scenery. The town itself is from another world, it feels like being in a movie. We´ve witnessed two Easter processions go through the narrow streets.

We have taken thousands of photos but unfortunately can´t post the tiniest little thing as of now, as the hotel internet broke down. During Easter there is just nobody to fix it up.

We ended up here by a totally random decision... We´ve been unbelievably lucky, as we drove here without knowing anything about the area. We didn´t have a hotel reservation but we had checked before hand that there should be a small hotel called "Los Olivos" around here. We picked the location mostly because it is kinda close to Sevilla but it´s a lot cheaper than the Sevilla hotels during Easter (which go for 250 EUR per night and up!)

Well, we ended up getting the last room in the last available hotel in the town, which is totally packed of tourists and locals wanting to see the Easter processions and the bull ride, which happens on Sunday.

Right now I´m waiting for the world´s slowest printer to print info of another hotel nearby, hoping to get a rom with functional internet connection... There´s a lot to talk about and a lot of amazing photos to show... stay tuned!

After spending a day in Torremolinos we stayed a few days in Malaga. The city of Malaga is somewhat of a nightmare if you're driving a car. Finding parking on the streets is nearly impossible, though there are some public parking garages available.

Malaga is a lot bigger city than Torremolinos. The number of one way streets and dead ends is so high it's not even funny so even if you know exactly where you want to go it may take quite a while to find out how to get there. I have had too many feelings of "wasn't I just here?".

One nice thing about this is that it kind of forces you drive around and see places you wouldn't see if the roads were easier to navigate! The city's architecture is actually pretty nice and there are a lot of nice buildings to see.