E-VITA

I have a Portuguese husband and when our two children were younger and living with us, we would regularly travel from Belgium to Portugal in the late 80s and early 90s, in order to visit my husband’s family and enjoy the southern European summer climate. It was not easy to prepare these 2000 km and two/three day-long trips: we would have to get the car ready, plan carefully what luggage to take with us for a month long stay and not overloading the car, and, order French, Spanish and Portuguese currencies at the bank, something, which was not always immediately available and needed to be planned with days in advance. Another concern was always the road itself. From Brussels, to Bilbao, there was a good motorway network, but from Bilbao onwards, the trip was made on trunk roads, with a lot of traffic, especially trucks. It would take us two, sometimes up to three full days to make this 2000 km trip. In order to ease our currency issues, I organized wallets in different colors, each containing a different currency (Belgian Franks, French Franks, Spanish Pesetas and Portuguese Escudos). At the end of crossing each country, every wallet would “grow”, as it would contain many coins, in comparison to the initial paper notes given by the bank. This was always a problem, as upon our return, the banks would never accept coins to exchange back. In France, we would have to spend a lot of money on motorway toll and on a night at a hotel or camping site, in Spain we would mostly spend money on food, and of course, on all the way, we had to spend money on fuel. We would either sleep on camping sites or in hotels, either in southern France or northern Spain. Camping was always a very exciting experience for the children. Similarly to today, petrol prices would vary a lot between countries, and just as today, petrol was cheaper in Spain and most expensive in France.
  
Another not always pleasant experience was crossing the borders: As we always had a fully loaded car, border police would often stop us, in order to control if we were taking any hidden illegal substances with us. They would make us unload all bags and packets, control every corner of the car, and make us put everything back as it was, in just 5 minutes (back home, it would take us sometimes up to 1 day to get everything carefully into the car). Adding to this, traffic jams at the borders were always long, as many cars would be stopped and inspected. The most time consuming border would be the French-Spanish border. In earlier years, our car had no air conditioning and it was sometimes quite difficult to cope with the heat. Aditionally, sitting two long days in a car was extremely exhausting and we were always very careful, by taking breaks during the trip. However, upon arrival at each destination, it really felt as if Belgium and Portugal were far away from each other, and we always needed to recover at least two full days in order to be fit again and enjoy our holiday. It always felt as if we had travelled a very long distance.

Over the years, travel conditions on this route improved significantly, not only because motorways were largely built in the 90s all over Spain and Portugal, but also because boarders were opened and finally, when the Euro was introduced in 2002, we would not have any more currency exchange issues.

Nowadays, my husband and I prefer to travel by plane, as our children left home and became independent. Also, travelling by air has become much cheaper, and for us psychologically, the distance between both countries has been cut significantly.
 

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