August 17th -25th – Holed Up in Comillas

With our electricity blown, and the new part on order and being couriered over to us, we had to find a nice place to stay for a few days. There are definitely worse places to hole up than Comillas – a seaside resort with a wide sandy beach and big waves, a pretty little medieval old town, and some interesting 19th century architecture too.

In the mid 19th century, this was just a fairly ordinary fishing village, until a poor local family, the Lopez y Lopez's went to South America to make their fortune. Their son made a huge amount of money as a businessman in Cuba, and decided to move back to Spain, marry an even richer wife, befriend the King, get himself made a Marquis, and spend lots of money on his home town (this was the first town in Spain to have electricity).

The new Marquis de Comillas cleverly married into the wealthy Guell family of Catalonia, who happened to be the patrons of a young architect called Antoni Gaudi, and so this is one of the few places outside Barcelona, where you can see some of Gaudi's fantastical architecture, along with some other Catalan Modernista masterpieces.

August 14th to 16th – Power Cut in Santander

Only our third stop on this tour, and already Tracy has found "somewhere she could live". Our first choice for a place abroad was Seville, but that's now gone down the pecking order because it's way too hot and we find it hard to understand the local accent. Here in Santander, they speak a fairly understandable Spanish and it doesn't get too hot because it's on the Atlantic.

The city's main feature is its wonderful beach – a long stretch of beautiful clean sand – according to my guidebook, the beach is the 8th cleanest in Europe; and despite being a ferry town, it's actually a very pretty place, backed by rolling green countryside.

Over the past few days, Tracy has resolved to become a fully fledged hippy - she is now making her own organic yogurt and growing her own mung beans in the van. I'm looking forward to her announcing that we're going to be raising free range chickens at our next camp site.

In our time here, we did lots of cycling up and down the hills from the campsite into town, did some lovely coastal walks, ate some delicious tapas, went to the beautiful beach, swam in the warm(ish) waters, and in contrast to these aforementioned fun activities, had to deal with an extremely annoying electrical problems with our van. There was an overnight power surge which somehow managed to blow the circuits on both ours and James and Rachel's transformers, leaving both of us without lights or water. Tracy did some excellent detective work and managed to get us some power back, but the upshot is that we have to order a new transformer at a cost of £120 – very irritating!

August 13th – Cliff Walk in Hendaye

After more overnight rain, it cleared up nicely for us to embark on a cliff top walk along the green coastline of Hendaye. We passed an odd-looking Neo-Gothic castle that had apparently been built for a famous astronomer in the 19th century, and kept walking as far as our empty stomachs would allow us.

On a sunny day (and there aren't as many as you'd think of a place that's just 15 miles from the glamorous resort of Biarritz) there can't be many more pretty places as this. We had lunch in a beachside café, and then it was time for the beach for the sun worshippers and bed for those in need of a siesta, before an early evening swimming session getting buffeted by the surf.

August 12th – San Sebastian

Today we caught the train from Hendaye, over the border to San Sebastian, one of Spain's most beautiful seaside towns, one of the country's gastronomic highlights, and the spiritual capital of the Basque Region. Even on a grey day, the golden sands of La Concha, possibly Spain's most attractive city beach, were full of holiday makers; while the famous tapas bars of the old town were piled high with delicious pintxos (basque tapas).

We immediately filled our boots with pintxos and got stuck into the beer and rioja – Spain is a lot more reasonable for going out than France – and then we walked it off by going for a bracing walk alongside San Sebastian's surf beach where the waves were rolling in nicely from the Atlantic.

Then it was time for yet more pintxos, before the half hour train ride back to France.

August 11th – Rainy day in Hendaye

One of the reasons why the Basque country is so beautiful is that it's very green – the result of plenty of rain coming in off the Atlantic, so I suppose we couldn't complain too much when the rain set in for the day. So, this was a day of watching DVDs, eating peanuts and drinking beer – not the worse way in the world to spend a day.

August 10th – Arrival in Hendaye

After waking up at the crack of 9am in our side-of-the-road camp ground, we finally made it to Hendaye (in the Basque country, on the French side of the border with Spain) in time for lunch. There, we met up with James, Rachel and Ruby, and Melanie and Kev, who'd set up camp in the only campsite which had room for us – 2 vans and 1 tent crammed onto one small plot, made it look a bit like a cross between Glastonbury and a refugee camp, but it would be our home for the next 4 nights.

There's not much to Hendaye, but it has got a fabulous beach – wide golden sands and decent enough waves to keep the surf dudes interested, and a few restaurants to keep us gluttons topped up.

August 9th – The Long and Winding Road South

Today starts our 2 month Odyssey around Northern Spain and Portugal. Unfortunately, to get to Spain, you have to drive the length of France first; however, we ambitiously felt that we could easily drive this all in one day, all 1,000kms of it.

So, we got up at 5am to drive to Dover, caught the Ferry to Calais with some of the more alarming examples of Britain's finest, and started the drive down. For the first time ever, we are throwing caution to the wind, and taking France's expensive toll roads to save time – this would cost us 110 Euros by the end of the journey, but the roads were fast and fairly traffic free.

Driving for 13 hours non-stop gets pretty monotonous, so the one highlight of the trip was at one of the queues for the tolls, when a van that was clearly over 2 meters high, ignored all the signs and lined up to pass through the barrier that prevented vehicles of his height going through. There were 10 cars in the queue ahead of him, so he had plenty of time to contemplate his actions, nevertheless he ploughed through the barrier, breaking it off on the top of his van, paid his toll and drove off – I presume it wasn't his van.

This excitement aside, the tiredness started to get the better of us, so we gave up at 9pm, 261kms short of our target on the French-Spanish border. We pulled into a service station and spent a surprisingly quiet night there.