Road trippin' with my two favourite allies ...

… fully loaded, we’ve got snacks and supplies 🎶

🎵 Road Trippin’ — Red Hot Chili Peppers

In this post I’ll share some of the pictures from our journey from Sesimbra to Wiesbaden. Our itinerary was as follows: Sesimbra to Madrid, then Madrid to Perpignan, to Montbéliard and lastly Wiesbaden. Three long days of driving, and then one last day to round off the trip in Alsace. 2.600km all in all. Easy.

I don’t really have a fair amount of pictures of every place. We did not have any time to go sightseeing in Madrid, for example, so you’ll be limited to just a single picture of some nice flowers I found along the way.

This will be the common thread of this post: It’s less about showing off the cities as much as things I saw along the way that I thought were kind of neat.

Spain

The poppy was incredibly everywhere we went in Spain.

Like I said, there’s not a lot here. We arrived late in Madrid (like 19:30), because we ran into delays and also crossed time zones (adding an hour to our time). We left early in the next morning as we had eight hours of driving to do to get across the French border. After none of us slept particularly well, Panda successfully resisted an early-morning walk, so we got some two hours of driving in before we ended up stopping for our walk in an area popular for hiking and outdoor activities.

After that, we were off to Perpignan with no additional stops.

This may honestly be one of my favourite photos I've taken so far.

France

Perpignan itself turned out to be incredibly underwhelming, unfortunately. As dog owners, when we get to a new city, we try to spot one or two parks on the map and go there so Panda can run freely for a bit (if circumstances allow). However, Perpignan miraculously managed to have zero green spaces available. All parks that had any amount of green had a strict no-dog policy, not even on a leash, which is something we genuinely don’t see a lot.

The city center had some nice architecture and is probably pleasant for going out and shopping, but overall very stressful if you are traveling with a dog.

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The old town of Perpignan – 1/3

Very artsy, if I may say so myself.

From Perpignan, we’re off to cross France all the way to Alsace. We spent a conservative hour-and-a-half in Lyon to get some food and see the city. Unfortunately, on that specific day there was an absurd amount of pollen going around to the point that both of us struggled with swollen noses and teary eyes, even though we don’t usually struggle with hay fever. No pictures, sadly. We’ll be back another day.

We then slept nearby Montbéliard in northern France. This was a mere three to four hours of driving from Wiesbaden, so we had some more free time to go and pay a visit to the Alsace region. I’m from Freiburg, so the entire region feels like home to me. We went for a bit of a walk, some croissants and tarte flambée in Ribeauvillé, between Mulhouse and Strasbourg.

View from the Vosges mountains over Ribeauvillé all the way into the Black Forest. I've only ever known things the other way around.

And that already concludes this post! There was not a lot here this time, largely because we did not have as much time and the whole trip was not even four whole days.

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Thanks for reading, and until next time!