Galicia, the Costa Verde and home via the Dune du Pilat

We drive to Galicia and we are totally blown away by this western tip of Spain...it's pleasantly empty, the coasts and beaches are incredibly beautiful and we stay in dream places - completely relaxed.

The roads are winding, narrow, there are only gravel roads to some beaches and the pitches themselves are rather small, so that we hardly see any (large) mobile homes.

This impression is later confirmed by travelers with Womo, with whom we speak in France on a pitch on the Atlantic and who were advised against the region for precisely these reasons.

In addition, some also shy away from the driving time in the corner and rather drive through the motorway to Portugal...good for us 🥳.

The locals are also friendly and we don't have the feeling of being a nuisance here as campers.

On a great beach at an old mill there is a free spot directly on a hill and we ask if we can stand there, which is immediately answered in the affirmative....the place is absolutely amazing and we can hardly believe our luck.

Below is a Spaniard with his van, who also reacts very relaxed and friendly.

In the evening we experience a great sunset and suddenly I see the Spaniard getting something out of his car that looks like a mixer.

I suspect that I can only be wrong, but Basti confirms it and around 10:00 p.m. he suddenly starts playing house music - with a joint in his mouth - and recording himself with the camera 😂.

Since we are guests in this country, we now want to ask him whether he is still quite cooked, but Basti only asks very politely how long he wants to make music, since we want to go to bed right away.

Our horror would be to have to change the location now 😳.

He speaks zero English but his girlfriend kindly says he finishes around 11pm and that's how it is - thank goodness and so we have a quiet night to the sound of the waves before continuing the next day.

We drive to cute Cudillero, a totally charming place that is touristy but not overcrowded and from there we continue along the coast.

It gets busier towards Cantabria and Asturias and the coast is much more populated.

Since the weather is also a bit mixed, we use the time to finally make some distance and look at the coast from the car. Basti goes paragliding again on the coast and then drive onto the highway towards San Sebastian.

There we only narrowly avoid an accident because a truck suddenly drives into our lane and pushes us off the road and Basti cannot simply avoid it because a car is much too fast in the left lane.

He somehow manages to dodge both of them very closely one after the other, although the cabin almost rocks... for me it's a miracle that it went well, my heart is racing... Mia complains from behind that her Tonie figure landed in Basti's footwell 😂.

We continue to San Sebastian and actually want to eat a few tapas in town...however, the place is completely unsuitable for parking for us, because you are not allowed to park there longer than 5m.

We then drive briefly to the city parking lot for disposal...an absolute nightmare. The mobile homes are standing close together in the small, ugly parking lot and a Munich mobile home is so long at 9 meters that the guy can seriously only spend the night right next to the disposal shaft of the camping toilets and has made himself comfortable there - have a nice holiday!

We have been hearing a whirring or humming from the car for some time and initially assumed that this was due to one of the Lassa tires from Morocco. So we also assumed that this was done with the tire purchase in Portugal... but unfortunately that's not the case and the noise is also getting louder.

Basti suspects bearing damage on the left rear wheel, but we don't know for sure and various attempts to isolate the noise more closely do not bring any clarity.

For example, we both ride in the back of the cabin and even listen carefully through the open covers (by the way, it's really not pleasant in the back while driving 🤪), but we can't really make sense of it.

We would like to have this clarified in a workshop before the long drive back, but some attempts to get a Spanish workshop to help us fail miserably because either no time at the moment or 'I can't' - the crowning glory is a VW dealer with service location in San Sebastian; 'Only by appointment and the next one is on 05.07!!!

Many thanks too - it's very realistic that a vacationer just needs more than a week to be able to diagnose a fault at all...- now let's just hope that the car doesn't stay in Spain...

So, a bit unnerved, we continue towards France and hope that everything goes well.

On the Atlantic coast of France, wild camping is not an option at all, so we drive to a really nice pitch on the beach of Ondres - really well done and totally fair in price... and what Mia is extremely happy about, a few girls her age with the bonus point "Mom , they even speak German 🤩".

Unfortunately, the waves on the beach are too high to go into the water, but at the beach bar there are shells for Basti and Mia 😝.

The next day it inevitably continues. We still want to go to the Dune du Pilat and jump into the water there one last time before we go in two long stages via Paris to Cologne.

It's really crowded at the dune, but we spend a nice afternoon there. Unfortunately, the campsite we wanted to go to (and went to a few years ago) is full.

Due to the devastating forest fires last year, only half of the square is usable and the square next to it was probably completely destroyed and will only reopen in July.

We find a very good alternative a little further inland, which even has a pool that we also use in the evenings.

The next morning we jet off and want to try to drive through Paris after 10:00 p.m., because otherwise there are always traffic jams and this plan works out well.

We spend the night quietly in a forest behind Paris and continue towards home.

And so we arrive back in Cologne on June 30th after 12 weeks and almost 12,000 kilometers... a strange feeling.

We are happy and grateful that we were able to enjoy these intensive weeks as a family; none of us got sick, we were spared from accidents, thefts or other crap and instead we were able to have many great adventures and experiences.

The cabin was our perfect home and we are all the more convinced of the concept for us...it will definitely be strange to have so much space and so much stuff at home again, because we didn't miss either of them on the road.

We are really looking forward to seeing you all again in person - it's really nice that you have accompanied our journey in this way; That was pure motivation to keep writing this blog and thus capture all the memories for us - thanks for that ❤️.