A few months’ ago, just as the summer was peaking, I turned my mind to thoughts of a New Year’s holiday. It’s worth planning ahead, even if there are always some excellent last-minute deals to be had.

I contemplated and discarded a few options for various reasons but the one I kept coming back to was simple: a road trip along Spain’s southern coast. As I pored over Google Maps a plan began to form.

1. The ideal way to cover the entire southern Spanish coast would be to start from the western most point of Spain and drive east towards the border with France. This meant flying to/from Seville and Barcelona but there are no direct flights to Seville from Prague.
   There are direct flights to Faro which is not that far away, so why not? Faro-Barcelona it is.  

The total trip from Faro to Barcelona is about 15 hours drive. I have two weeks to do the whole trip. I don’t mind driving but a short drive from one destination to the next means I get more time to see the cities. Seville, Granada, Alicante, Valencia – the names just rolled off the map and into my subconscious. I could easily spend a day in each destination and move on, making this trip truly memorable. Close to Barcelona is the town of Figueres, birthplace of Salvador Dali. I fully intend to spend some time there and see the place. The number of destinations started to increase so I became determined to spend as much time as possible in all the towns in between Faro and Barcelona; after all, I can always fly back to Faro and/or Barcelona and spend a long weekend there. I can’t travel as easily to Granada. Once I’m in the area, and since I’m going to see the coastline anyway, I wondered if it’s worth seeing Gibraltar. How often will I be in the region again and have such an opportunity? Following this logic, why not pop into Andorra right on the border with France and Spain? Suddenly, I realised that I could possibly also fit in a day trip to Morocco from the southern tip of Spain.

I then decided to make it a road trip and, if I include a short stop in France, to turn this into a “14 days, 6 countries and 2 continents” road trip.

The only thing that’s left is to plan an approximate itinerary, with the help of Tripit, and then I’ll be off for my New Year’s trip!

I wrote about the trip after I’d made it too.