A few years ago I had the opportunity to plan and go on a very nice travel experience, which was to explore the Iberian coast: Spain and Portugal.
I'll tell you some of the planning process, and in the next few posts I'll share some of the experiences on each stop.
The Plan
I would be arriving in Barcelona in a transatlantic cruise from Brazil (more on that experience some other time). We wanted to explore Spain and Portugal before going back home, and not just necessarily just the main touristic stops. We had 14 days to do that.
Renting a car and driving around in the coast seemed like the best option. So I started by gathering the main Spanish and Portuguese cities and plotting them on a map and trying to connect the dots on a few potential routes.
Spanish Road Signs
Some stops - such as Zaragoza - were thrown out for not fitting in any viable routes. Some smaller, picturesque stops, such as Peñiscola, were added in for being right in the path, and to balance the time in the road with the time in the cities.
Driving the whole way didn't seem totally viable too. I ended up choosing to drive down the coast from Barcelona to Seville, then returning the car and taking a train to Madrid. After a few days there, we'd get on a plane to Porto, then rent another car and drive down Portugal's highways all the way to Lisbon.
Rainy Portuguese Road Signs
I picked the largest cities, Barcelona, Madrid and Lisbon as anchor points, set the dates we'd spend there, and balanced the routes around them. Then made a very interesting, somewhat risky decision: didn't fix the dates of any other stops: I'd find a hotel or other lodging when I was there, allowing us to spend more time in the places we found the most interesting, and rush faster through places where we had seen everything in less time than planned.
Road Sights
For every city in the planned path, plus a few nearby "nice to have" stops, I researched and made a list of places of interest (museum, parks, restaurants, among others) and lodgings to go. The list was somewhat extensive and we couldn't possibly visit them all - the idea was to make the day schedule based on that, what we had seen so far, and things we had discovered locally. Wikitravel is your friend here.
It turned out great - I didn't account for the very late sunset time of the Spanish spring, so we had several extra hours to explore every day, being able to get ahead of schedule and spend more time than expected in the most interesting places.
We made a couple extra stops than planned due to that, and had trouble finding accommodation in only one city: Seville, which was in the middle of Feria de Abril, which I had read about when planning the trip but misjudged just how massive that was. Nearby Jerez de la Frontera was hosting the MotoGP stop which didn't help the overcrowding, but it ended up being for the best: we discovered the lovely nearby city of Carmona, which we wouldn't have otherwise.
More Road Sights
With the route set, all was left was to rent the cars and book the train and plane connections. Renting a car in one place (Barcelona and Porto) and returning it in a different city (Seville and Lisbon) is allowed by most companies, but it takes a lot of extra effort to find the right combination with a good price without big return fees. Bonus points if you are able to get and return the car at the airport and train station you are arriving at or leaving from. At one point I had considered driving from Spain to Portugal but that made the rental even more difficult.
So that was it - route planned, points of interest mapped, cars rented, plane and train tickets in hand. How did it go? I'll tell you in the next part!
