🤢 Vomiting & 'Ça plane pour moi' 🎶💊✨
[09:55] Good morning, world! Today I woke up with an earworm from the late 70s: 👂🐛 hahaha...
"Ça plane pour moi" by Plastic Bertrand. I used to listen to it when I was a kid, walking with my cousin through les rues de Paris. I love that city!🗼
Every year my parents (I was born in Germany) drove 2,500 km from Germany on holiday to Portugal. We always made a brief pause in Paris...
I feel so nostalgic. I was only 8 months old on my first trip to Portugal—by car! It was a white Ford Taunus. My parents had the car packed with children (three of us, as my youngest sister wasn't born yet) and luggage, and we drove for at least 36 hours. (Obviously, our cars and the roads went through upgrades over the years!)
Back then, the route from Germany to Portugal wasn't fully connected by motorways! Coming down through the Pyrenees at San Sebastián, we had to brave the dreaded border controls. It took hours just to get through passport checks and customs (especially between Spain and Portugal).
Once in Spain, the high-speed motorway abruptly ended in Burgos. From there, we had to survive the national roads, finally entering Portugal at Guarda, which sat just across the border.
But the challenge wasn't over. To get from Guarda to Ovar ( No IP5!), we had to cross the Bussaco mountain range—a journey that took 5 hours just to reach Ovar. My brother and I had to endure hours of endless S-curves, vomiting throughout the trip because the winding mountain roads were just too much for our stomachs to bear!
It wasn't until the late 80s and early 90s that they finally finished the modern motorways and connected the network in Portugal. Before that, driving those final stretches was a complete nightmare! But I happily travelled those roads every year until I was 16...
Listen for yourself: