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In 1998:
Route Map
01 Extremadura
02 Cabo de Gata
03 Mallorca
04 Ronda
05 Madrid

In 1999:
06 Sevilla
07 Mojácar
08 Towards Norway

Rocinante the Tiger:
On the Road
An accident

And some more:
The Short Story
Bars in Andalusía
Nerja and Axarquía
Photo Gallery
The road home 2001


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Introduction

  • Bente and Rocinante in the beautiful high plains of Andalusia
    Bente and Rocinante in the beautiful, high plains of Andalusia

    What's contained in these pages

    Stories, that's what, combined with photographs, telltales from our travels on a Triumph Tiger in Spain. The stories are divided in eight main chapters, called Long Trip..... They tell about places and experiences we had. In addition there are stories covering different topics, like buying a bike in Spain, going to a bar or describing the region close to Nerja.

    The travels took us into all the differents parts of Andalusía, from the coastal region to the high plains, up to Sierra Nevada, east to the deserts and into the national parks of cabo De Gata, Sierra Cazorla and Parque Doñana. We visited towns like Carmen's Sevilla, Granada with Alhambra, Toledo - old capital of Castilla, Madrid, the three conquistador towns of Mérida, Cáseres and Trujillo, Jerez de la Frontera with the sherry wine, Ronda on the hilltop, Tarifa on the southern most point of Europe, Almería, Guadix with the caves and on and on. We also brought the bike over to Mallorca and drove on nearly every drivable road on the island. The last story is about the trip back home to Norway, done in a few days in April 1999. Rocinante had 18000 km on the clock when she was back in Norway.

    Who should this interrest

    Well, that is a difficult question. Hopefully, the pictures and stories should interrest a lot of people, but the groups below are our main targets;
    - Travellers going to southern Spain or thinking/dreaming about going there
    - Motorcyclists, especially those who travel as well and maybe dream about or consider going to Spain to do something similar to what we have done
    - Hobby photographers, people generally interrested in Spain  

    Who are we

    We are a Norwegian couple named Bente Bråthen and Dag Jenssen. She(Bente), born in 1968, has worked in Spain as a tourist guide many years ago and is now working as secretary, project secretary and from time to time as a dowhatever in her father's business. Dag, born in 1964, works as a engineer in the offshore seismic industry and has photography as a small hobby. Together we have been traveling in Australia, Greece and Mexico, but always on a tight schedule. Dag has driven a motorcycle since 1990. Both speak spanish, she speaks it very well and he gets by!

    What brought us here

    In October 1997 we decided to sell our appartment and started looking for a house in Porsgrunn, Norway. But after seeing three houses we questioned our motives and re-decided to rather do something we had wanted all the three years we had been together, to go to Spain and improve our Spanish. And so we did, just like that! I(Dag) applied for a two months leave of absence, which gave me a total of three months off in one go(My schedule is one month on a vessel, one month off). Bente had a very free working contract in her father's business, and simply told him she was going away for six months. Accepted! We sold the appartment and left between christmas and new year 1997-1998. We stayed for seven months in southern Spain, but due to a slow registration process, the bike wasn't in use more than three months in 1998. We returned in January 1999 for four more weeks. Finally, I returned alone in April and drove the bike to Norway.

    Why did we create this homepage

    The page wasn't even thought of when we left for Spain. A bit of luck left us with a borrowed laptop with Frontpage Express installed. We were already writing the stories, but as a private diary only. I played around for a while with Frontpage and soon found this so interesting that the next step was to learn basic HTML. After a while I quit using Frontpage and started using Notepad to make a simple homepage. Next step was to include the stories we had written and link them to a main page as a advanced diary, a neat way of keeping track of the different pieces. When we had gotten this far, why not pretend to create a page for other people to read. So I scanned in some pictures and played with the layout for a while, reread the stories and made some changes to try to make them somewhat useful to others. Later things were redone a few times, more photos were scanned and here we are.
    (Feedback is the only way for us to know what you think. Don't feel obliged to give it, but it would be appreciated.)

    The bike

    I bought the bike in Malaga, Spain on tourist license plates. She's a Triumph Tiger 900, 1998 model, an dual sports bike which is the perfect tool for getting around in this part of the world. Spains backroads was probably created with this bike in mind. We baptized her Rocinante, the namesake of Don Quixote's horse. There is no connection between the two as our Rocinante has done the job she was set to do without as much as a hiccup. She covered 18.000km in a about four months.

    The base camp

    We got ourself an appartment in the little and lively town of Nerja, 50km east of Malaga. The place was used as a base camp for our travelling, a place to come back to after a week on the road, meet some new friends and recharge for a new trip. The town is lively and, or but, filled up with retired northern Europeans throughout the winter, a fact that made me name it the Nerja Centro Geriatrico when we arrived. But when you get on the inside after a while, it proves to have a lot to offer a couple of relatively young norwegians who manages the Spanish language.


    So go back to the home page, scan through the menu and choose where to start, or just start at the top. Have a nice journey!

     
     

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    © All photos and text on this site is the property of Bente Bråthen and Dag Jenssen. Contact us if interested in publishing or reusing material from us.
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