(written 15/3/2006 08:45 CET in Luso, Portugal)
Citroën again gave us the address of a local dealer to attempt to find in the much smaller than Blibao but not at all tiny Burgos.
However these proved pretty much rubbish as an address doesn't translate all that easily to a spot on a map, even with the help of a tourist office, a Subaru dealer (there were plenty of other car dealers as well, just no Citroën!) and an hour or so of random driving. Eventually a service station attendant came through, with excellent directions and even pin-pointing it on our map, far far away from the location that Citroën themselves had told us.
Eventually arriving after all the hassle this service had caused, we were dismayed to be told that they had no room to do this service today, would we like it done at 4pm the next day?! No thanks, this was supposed to take 20 minutes and this place was huge. The not at all helpful service manager girl (Liz noted her purple eyeshadow as a bad sign) was far superceeded by a random helpful salesman with good English, who told us to go just around the corner to a different dealership who could do it straight away!
We liked the sound of that deal, and by the time we drove there, apologised that we didn't speak Spanish and asked if they spoke English, they knew who we were, what we were there for and the bonnet was up!
Literally twenty minutes in the park across the road with the cold wind blowing between the uninspiring apartment blocks on either side and Schnee Three was done! (The name combines the car's model C3 with the German word for snow - Schnee - since early on in the journey he got so covered in the stuff).
After all that mucking around, and the fact we had no set targets across the top of España, we powered across motorways for several hours towards
La/A Coruña at the top of the western coast.
We stumbled into what turned out to be one of the few free parking spots in the entire city, asked the i for a list of pensions, picked the cheapest which turned out to be a nice rambling old hotel, lugged our bags most of the way across the city and chilled out.
Dinner called a little while later, and we walked back across the city again (getting some exercise to make up for all this eating!) to the Lonely Planet recommended places - one of which didn't appear to exist anymore and the other, Meson do Pulpo, which didn't look all that lively. Turns out this wasn't a sign to worry about as the calamari and pimiento tapas were fantastic, almost a meal in themselves. A couple more bars up the street we ate again a few other things almost as good, before the big walk back to our hotel and sleep.