We left Castellon de la Plana in early July. Our destination – Gdansk, Poland with a short stopover in Berlin for 3 nights.

We planned the drive to stop 5 nights before reaching Berlin. This allowed us to drive around 4-5 hours per day sometimes a little less.

Our first night on the road we stopped at a roadside hotel in the Spanish border town of La Jonquera just 12 minutes from the French border.
We expected the regular Spanish town with a few hotels and service stations on the highway. What you get is a weird town that seems to have grown and extended itself out from the historical centre to now offer at least 5 large supermarkets, 2 casinos, 2 sex shows, 2 sex/strip joints (Salvador counted them), a very large shopping outlet with major clothing brands, 6 or 7 service stations, truck stops and hotels. Plus huge American-style buffet eateries.
We think many French come across the border for the supermarkets but we are not sure.
It’s apparently one of the largest truck stops in Europe and is also known for the drug trade. This was all unknown to us until we arrived.
I stayed in our room because I was tired, it was raining and I’m a chicken. Salvador went for a walk to discover the wonders of this town.
It felt like another country, it was so strange.

Anyway the next day we drove through beautiful green lush forests and lavender fields of the French countryside with a short drink stop in the lovely French village of Gallargues-le-Montueux.

We stayed near Lyon the second night the next day drove towards the German border near Strasbourg to stay in a beautiful B & B in the village of Bruyeres.

We crossed the border into Germany and travelled the famous autobahns. Firstly the A5 then A6. It was meant to be a 4-5 hour drive to our next stop and I think we left at 9am and arrived at our guesthouse at around 6pm with two 20-minute stops. There were roadworks everywhere and so much traffic. It was exhausting for me, so I can only imagine what it was like for Salvdor who was driving. We were a little shocked at the roads, to be honest. Spain has amazing infrastructure when it comes to their roads and freeways and we were used to there always being an alternative road if one road was slow or messy. On the major routes, there were usually 2 or 3 roads running almost parallel that you could choose (usually an AP and A freeway plus a National road). No such luck when we travelled the A5 and A6 in Germany. You could leave the autobahn but only if you wanted to go for a country drive. So we were stuck. The video shows the lanes going the other way and the traffic almost at a standstill just as we made our way out of a major roadworks section where we had been stuck in similar traffic.

Anyway, we had a wonderful night staying in a family-run guesthouse. The family were so friendly and welcoming. Salvador enjoyed his first German beer and I had a wonderful local lemonade (similar to a homemade one). We had a great meal in their restaurant and chatted to the bartender who was very excited to hear we were from Australia as he and his family had visited Cairns and loved it.

We spent the next night in Meissen before heading off early the next morning for Berlin. On our way, we detoured to Rakotzbrücke or The Devil’s Bridge. I read about this place on Atlas Obscura, always a good site to discover interesting places to visit.

“Commissioned in 1860 by the knight of the local town, the thin arch stretching over the waters of the Rakotzsee is roughly built out of varied local stone. The Rakotzbrücke is known as a “devil’s bridge,” due to the colloquialism that such bridges were so dangerous or miraculous that they must have been built by Satan. While the bridge was created by mortal hands, its builders did seem to hold the aesthetics of the bridge in higher regard than its utility. Either end of the Rakotzbrücke is decorated with thin rock spires created to look like natural basalt columns, which occur in many places in Germany. In addition, the curvature of the bridge is designed to be one half of a perfect circle, so that when the waters are still and the light is right, it creates the illusion of a complete stone circle”. from Atlas Obscura

It was beautiful even on a grey day.

Our next stop was Berlin and we were looking forward to a 3 night break.