The secret I was alluding to in previous posts finally happened this weekend.  On Saturday morning, we left our house at 11am en route to Alicante, where we were flying out of for our trip to Iceland.  The only person in Iceland that knew we were coming is B´s brother who was picking us up at the airport.

From what I´d been told, and from how it looked from Google Maps, the trip to Alicante is supposed to take about 6 hours.  The directions given by Google Maps started us going North to Sevilla and then West through to Alicante. 

To save a few hours, I´ll summarize by saying this:  the directions were CRAP.

We ended up driving through Ronda and when we got through, all we saw signs for was San Pedro, which B couldn´t find on the map.  We stopped at a restaurant that was closed but someone was thankfully outside of who was kind enough to show us where San Pedro was.   It´s due South, right near Marbella - which was the other route we could have taken and would have saved us 3 hours of driving in one giant circle.  But San Pedro was only 45 kilometers away, and since we left with amount of buffer time, we breathed a sigh of relief and figured we´d be back on track shortly.

San Pedro.  Stupid (#$&/(!”#)%)#/ San Pedro.

The drive to San Pedro is only 45 kilometers. OF TWISTING ROADS GOING DOWN A MOUNTAIN.  The kind where you can´t go faster than 20mph.  The kind where your kids are in the back of the car crying because their stomachs hurt so bad.  The kind where you can´t pull over and get a breather OR ELSE YOU´LL MISS YOUR PLANE. 

When we finally got to San Pedro, we had missed out on so much time that we were starting to worry about whether we´d make it to Alicante in time.  But hey, now we´re back to the Autovia (the freeway) and we can catch up on some lost time.  Right?  RIGHT?

WRONG.

The Autovia suddenly disappeared.  Lucky us!  We got to take the scenic route!  The scenic route that was TWISTING ROADS GOING ALONG A MOUNTAIN.  Where once again our kids were getting sick (don´t bother mentioning Sea Bands in your comments since we already had them!), we were getting near tears, the time was ticking away quickly, and we couldn´t stop for anything.

We finally made it to the Autovia and had serious doubts that we´d be able to make it to Alicante in time.  This is when B changed his never-changing tune about me driving too fast to, “Hey, can you drive a little faster?” 

And this is where Karyn channeled Matt Kenseth and turned their little blue Scion xA into a black and yellow speeding machine.

And this is also where Karyn stopped hating driving in Spain.

I pushed our little crappy car to its limits, driving an average of about 90mph for the next 4 hours.  B said I got up to 100mph once but when the car starts feeling like it´s going to start hydroplaning on a dry road, that´s when I back off just a weeee little bit.  Like to 95mph.

In the entire drive, we only saw one police car the whole time and that was someone in Marbella merging on just to merge back off.  And unbelievably, despite my record speed in my car, we still had a car here and there fly past us like I was a grandmother on a Sunday drive. 

As you can probably figure by now, we did make it to Alicante in time.  When we pulled into the airport, we still had to find our parking company so we were going to ask for directions at the departures terminal.  Our luckiest of lucky luck, the van from the company was at the terminal dropping the last of the people off just as we arrived and we unloaded, B took the car to park and I took the kids in the terminal and we got to our line at about 8:15pm.  The line took over an hour to get through, so as soon as we checked our luggage, we went to our gate, got through passport control, got on a bus, and got on our plane.

We made it.  And B will never talk smack about my driving again.