Part one: Have a plan
This is a trip to the mainland of Spain planned two weeks in advance that went “a little bit slightly turbo”. The whole idea was buying a car. Alexandra had a couple of Romanian friends and they found a suitable Audi A4 in Quintanar del Rey. To get there we had to leave Ibiza on Friday, go to Denia by ferry boat using the Ibiza-Formentera-Denia route, meet with Marius and Mihaela at the ferry in Denia go back to their place in Quintanar del Rey (260km see route here) sleep Friday night there, on Saturday take the car drive to Barcelona, find Atlassib to pick up the bicycle, take the wheels off, stuff it in the car, drive to the port, get on the ferry and go home. Some of you might not be familiar with the bicycle part but my bicycle was sent from Romania to Barcelona in Spain (because that’s the closest that Atlassib gets to Ibiza) and the problem is that they would only give it to me in person and no matter how I tried I could not convince them to give it up to DHL to deliver it on the island.
Part two: Stick to it (or How it all went wrong)
Along the way we encountered a couple of problems though. In Denia we had a hard time meeting up with Marius and Mihaela because Balearia has terminals on both sides of the port: we were at one terminal and they were at the other one. These two terminals were rather similar as well: “OK, I see the roundabout.” “Good. If you see the roundabout then we’re the ones parked on the right side.” “There’s a huge truck on the right side.” “There are no trucks here”. You get the idea. It went on like this for around 45 minutes before we finally met. Then Marius, who is a professional driver took us all back to Quintanar del Rey or… home. The guy was only doing 160km/h when he was writing an SMS while driving or looking for his cigarettes. The rest of the time the speedometer would read anywhere between 180 km/h and 200 resting with predilection around 200. A nice ride all in all. After this I was able to believe him when he said that he drove from Quintanar del Rey to Timisoara in just 24 hours (2647km see route here). We got to Quintanar del Rey where Mihaela has the best Tapas bar in town ate a bit and went to sleep.
The following day at around 1 o’clock we were leaving Quintanar del Rey heading for Barcelona in the car which is an Audi A4 the first model ever produced. It has a 1.9 diesel engine that produces 90 horse power. It was run for 124.000 kilometers or, as programmers put it, it has 124 K. Loads of extras like climatronic, onboard computer, abs etc. We got a bit lost along the way and got to Barcelona at 21 o’clock in the evening after driving 895km according to the onboard computer with a medium fuel consumption of 4.5 liters for 100km. In the mean time we bought a map. Half an hour is way too little time to find Atlassib and get on the ferry so we resumed to trying to find Atlassib and slept in a parking lot when we finally gave up at 10 o’clock in the evening. We were prepared to sleep in the car so we had sleeping bags and all. The bad thing though was that there was no ferry till Monday evening. So here we are “lost in Barcelona” with 48 hours to spend.
Day3: Sunday
On Sunday we got up at 7 and started to look for Atlassib. I drove for 3 hours in the hellish traffic you would normally expect in Barcelona’s center. We stopped and grabbed a byte and then it was her turn for another 5 hours. We eventually found Atlassib and I finally got my bicycle, took the wheels off and stuffed it in the trunk along with several other things. The next problem was that I had to work on Monday, I had my laptop and everything but a good internet connection was required and also in a decent place. A cafe or a McDonalds would not do. We were pondering on how to do that when Alexandra said: “Well… I have this friend in the south of France…” and it was “To France!” from then on. We drove another 200km (that was a doodle next to the 900 the day before), and found ourselves faced with another problem: we could not get a hold on Elias because he was off to Italy as we later found out. So we slept in the car for the second time some 25 kilometers from Perpignan.
On Monday morning, at 6:30 we got up and were determined to drive to Barcelona and find a nice internet cafe that was quiet enough for my Skype calls and had a wireless connection for my laptop. It was then that we found that Elias had returned and sent us an SMS sometime during the night. We drove back 25km to his place and finally met with him. It was all nice and sweet, I had a nice cozy place to work in, Alexandra was hovering around the house etc. Elias came back around lunch with some friends and his girlfriend also came with a friend. He cooked a good meal and we were 7 persons around a round table: one Italian (Elias’s girlfriend) one Lebanese (Elias himself), two Romanians, two French guys and another girl from Chile. Thank you Elias and Stef! 
After my working day was over we left for Barcelona where in 4 hours we had to board the ferry. After getting lost so many times in Barcelona we had no problems finding the port and boarding the ferry 
This “boat” would leave at 9:30 in the evening and would take 9 hours and a half to get to Ibiza literally crawling at 6 knots/hour.
We arrived early in the morning in San Antonio where we were met with a light rain and drove all the way to Santa Eulalia (or home), a staggering 28 kilometers. First thing when we got home I fired up Silvia and pulled two great shots of Illy espresso that I finally managed to find in France, again thanks to Elias and Stef!
After we had what some call “Beautiful coffee” it was work again with a small lunch break transformed in a Audi photo shooting session since a few of my friends badly wanted to see pictures.
I guess that that’s about it, it was loads of fun and quite interesting. I welcome questions and remarks and I’d like to thank again to everyone that has made this possible, in no particular order Marius and Mihaela, Elias and Stef, Alexandra and myself 
Cheers to all of you!
