Spain has been the target of our annual two-week-long tours for several years. We were planning this trip for months but there was always something which stopped us from moving ahead. We either lacked the courage to face certain kinds of danger or didn’t have sufficient budget or proper equipment to visit at least half of the places we had planned to see. This year, to our big surprise, we manged to arrange everything what we needed to embark on the journey to Andalusia.
The crucial component of any venture is strategy and related preparations. We formed a group of five people: three girls (Kasia, Daria and me) and two boys (Bartek and Tomek). Then we divided tasks according to individual interests and abilities. The female part of our team was tasked to take care of aesthetic aspects of our adventure such as creating personalised T-shirts for each of us and buying Polish souvenirs for our friends in Spain, focusing on what Poland is mainly famous for: vodka and ‘ptasie mleczko’ , a traditional Polish goody which is pretty similar to a British chocolate covered marshmallow.
We made a list of all the necessary things which could help us to survive such as practical wet wipes, gas cylinder, ‘Chinese’ instant soups, films for ‘old-fashioned’ cameras and other brilliant inventions of our civilization. Bartek and Tomek took care of more practical matters. They checked the technical condition of our car, replaced the tyres, prepared trailer to transport the paragliding equipment and cooking equipment such as portable gas stove and at the end they checked the condition of our tents. We thought that we were very well-prepared and everything looked perfect. Unfortunately, we were wrong….Later, it turned out that something had escaped our notice (I’ll write about it later on).
A week prior to our trip we sat down together and developed an action plan and calculated the best possible route. Obviously, in the course of our journey everything was changed. Luckily, all the modifications were positive. Then we supplied our portable refrigerators with kabanos sausages, potted meat, bottles of beers and other nutritious foods.
In the early morning (14.08.2015) we dressed our ‘expedition T-shirts’, hopped in the car and our long-awaited 8,000km journey started, thereby fulfilling the dream of each of us.
