I hadn't seen Nacho since the Valencia race, and I wanted to touch base with him to discuss some of the teams I had spoken with and some other possibilities I had in mind. The same way I'm into Motorcycle racing, Nacho is into Skiing. He and a couple friends rent an apartment in Baguera for the winter season. The drive took us approximately six hours, and during the drive we went through the town of Lleida, up into the mountains, and finally to Vielha, the largest village in the area we would be staying in. Our car stereo was a tape deck with two three inch speakers, and while this doesn't sound too bad, imagine having only one tape full of warped dance music. I didn't realize there were so many of them (the mountains, that is), and driving such a small car (on 13's!) was difficult. We stopped half way there at a truck stop in the hills before the mountains proper. Mario said that truck stops were the best because the food would be good, but my dinner of grease, ham, and cheese didn't cut it. Still, it was rural enough that the restaurant actually made it's own bread, and it was good! We didn't pass a single car, and our top speed on the straights was 110KMH. Going up? Sometimes we drove for twenty minutes at 40KMH. That's really slow. The snow began to fall as we approached the mountains and between the rain, ice, and snow falling, we had quite an adventure just making it through the mountain passes. Near the top of one of the larger peaks we went through a series of tunnels, 16, to be exact. Most of them were small, maybe between 1/8 and 1/4 mile long. The last one was 5 kilometres long! That's HUGE! I think it's just over 3 miles, and we collected quite a few cars behind us because they weren't allowed to pass in the tunnel. Once we were through the mountains, we crossed several small villages, each with twisty, winding roads, and tried to navigate via cel phone with landmarks, because there weren't road signs or street signs. Plus, we didn't have a map of the area -- they didn't make one! I don't know how we did it, but we managed to find the cathedral in the town of Baguera and attempted to park. It was a sliding contest which gravity won and the little car lost. I ended up pushing for a long time to get the car rotated around and into a spot. Like elsewhere in Spain, there are no parking spaces, just spots where you can be creative. You simply find a place you think your car will be safe, and out of the way enough, and leave it there. I heard some yelling, looked up, and saw Nacho waving from the top floor of this place. He came out in shorts (!) and helped get our things inside the apartment.
