TWENTY FOUR AND COUNTING
11.50pm: Touch down in Spain, just in time to pick up our hire car and hit the road bound for Tarifa. Our flight home departs in exactly twenty four hours, the clock is ticking! The front seat of our tiny Fiat hire car is stuck all the way forward and we can’t shift it, meaning I am going to have to sit in the back with knees parked either side of my chin for the duration of the trip; it’s times like these I think about being a wedding photographer. It’s around a 100 mile drive past Gibraltar, into Tarifa and we finally roll into town, via several toll roads, at 1.30am and still quite amped up from the journey. The thought does cross our minds to head to a bar, but we have already arranged to meet Tarifa local Ben Van Der Steen at 8am the following morning so for once we do the sensible thing and head to our accommodation.
2am: After wiggling through tracks up a mountain on the far side of town we finally stumble on Timo’s friend’s house where we manage to alert all four dogs who in turn wake up the family. On the plus side, the wind is off the hook with trees swaying violently outside. Ben is already calling for 50 knots in the morning, nothing unusual here in Tarifa but it’s going to be a shock to the system to go in at the deep end on this windswept coastline.