Wednesday 8th of April
We woke up for the last time in Granada, packed our bags, checked out of the hostel and headed to Hertz to pick up our rental car. The plan was to drive to Alicante, pick up by brother and his girlfriend from the train station and drive straight down to Calpe to meet up with my parents. Obviously there was gonna be few complications on the way.
The car we picked up was a white Renault Clio and it was great as it
had a built-in navigator! I had to be the driver as Ricky's driving
licence had quite conveniently expired. We found our way to the right
road easily (thanks to the navigator) and started our journey towards Alicante.
We stopped for breakfast quite soon after heading off at roadside
hotel/restaurant. The drive went really well, and about 4 and a half
hours after heading out from Granada we arrived at the Alicante train station. Very soon after my brother Eetu and his girlfriend Meeri arrived to the station by train from Barcelona!
We
packed their stuff to the car and set of merrily! Before we even got
out of the car park I drove into a metal curb (?!) and flattened a tyre.
We drove into a nearby parking hall and called the roadside emergency
number the car rental place had given us. We explained what happened and
they said they'll send someone over. In the meantime we sat down at a
nearby bar for a cerveza
(I had a coffee as I was being a responsible driver). The repair guy
arrived in like 30 minutes which was really good. Luckily we were still
in the centre of the city so the help was close. The guy put in a
temporary tyre so we could drive to the Alicante
Hertz office. They didn't have a proper tyre at the office to replace
the temporary one so we had to take a different car. Luckily we had
taken the full accident cover on the rental car so we didn't have to pay anything extra for all this.
We were in high spirits as we jumped into the new car and finally were on our way towards Calpe! Quite soon we faced a bit of a problem though. This car didn't have a navigator and we had no idea how to drive to Calpe from Alicante.
We struggled for quite a while after finding the correct road and we were
all getting a bit anxious and tired (at least I did). Eventually we did
find the correct road and were on our way towards the final
destination, a villa in Calpe. We found our way to Calpe
alright and drove down to the area of villas were we knew our villa was
as well. Now this place was an absolute maze. We drove around the
little road between dozens and dozens of identical villas when we
decided to give up and call my parents. They asked us to drive to this
one restaurant were they would come and pick us up from. We found the
restaurant and in a few minutes my Dad arrived and drove ahead to show
us the way to our villa.
We were finally there! And what a place it was! This villa was enormous! There were enough beds for 10 people to sleep in.
All we had the energy left to do was to have dinner and a few drinks at the villa before going to bed.