A nostalgic account of a journey to Valencia in 1999, highlighting the challenges of affordable travel and the eventual reward of discovering a vibrant city.
My first visit to Valencia in Spain was in 1999 and I was mightily impressed by the city. The journey there was a different matter. At the time getting cheap flights online was in its infancy. There were no direct flights from Dublin and the likes of Ryanair did not serve the city, which was not then a major tourist destination. I told my two brothers I’d take care of travel arrangements as I had access to a computer. I eventually, after much effort, managed to get rock-bottom fares.
But the fares were to turn out to be the only cheap thing about the trip. The flights involved going from Shannon to Brussels and then Brussels to Barcelona. This meant we had to drive from Dublin to Shannon and as the first flight was early in the morning we arranged to stay the night before with a cousin in Newmarket on Fergus in Clare. Of course as a token of our appreciation we took his wife and himself out for a pricey meal. We finally arrived in Brussels airport the next morning to discover it wasn’t the most exciting landing spot in the world, but we whiled away the day there spending our money on high-priced food and drink. By the time we got into Barcelona that night all the trains to Valencia had gone and we hadn’t a clue about buses. The result was that we had to find a local B&B, which again set us back quite a bit. We were also all pretty much exhausted as the time entailed to get there could have had us half way round the globe. However, Valencia was worth the pain and my brothers eventually forgave me. My older brother Bernard had bought a small flat in Benimaclet, a student area of the city teeming with life. I remember thinking it was really exotic to have orange trees growing in the streets, not that you would eat any of them as they were bitte
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