It’s been an odd sort of day. We’re leaving fairly early tomorrow to catch the 14:20 train. We’ll need to charge close to the train station in order to make it to the Ibis Hotel Rouen Nord where we and the dogs are spending the first night. It’s roughly 205 km from the eurotunnel terminal to the hotel and the nearby charging system so we’ll need a full battery to make it.

Most things are packed. The i3 is a fairly small car so we’ll need to be fairly frugal with stuff. We’re taking 3kg of dog food which we’ll mix with bags we’ll buy in Spain as we need them. Tal and Pero have heavy duty stomachs so it’s unlikely they’ll have much of an issue adapting to a new diet. We’ve extensive experience with Spanish laundrettes so we don’t need to take much in the way of clothing but if I’m to get a decent sub hour time in the town and gown on the 14th May I’ll need to run most days. It should be possible despite the hours spent travelling. We’re intending to stop for the night in each of Angouleme, San Sebastián and Salamanca on our journey down to Aracena, a little way north west of Seville.

None of the day’s journeys are longer than 450 km so we’ve plenty of time to stop and charge, walk the dogs, maybe run for an hour or so. We’ll take our time, hopefully avoiding the worst of the motorway food, though french Aires do serve far better fare than British motorway service stations.

We’ve booked four nights in Aracena where we’ll walk some of the trails. There are a number of other outstanding areas of natural beauty in Andalucia and if the dogs and we are enjoying ourselves in the hills we’ll maybe pay them a visit. Alternatively we may head west to the Algarve, spend a few days exploring before heading up to Lisbon, Porto and possibly Santiago with perhaps a short doggy camino thrown in for good measure.

Meanwhile, we need to finish our packing.