At least the food was good!

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We have just visited Carmona. It was the last stop on our holiday and it wasn't quite the relaxed last day we had planned!

We left lovely Cordoba just before mid day and drove to Carmona which is a little over an hour away. We thought we would spend a night here as it is a lot closer to Seville airport, where we had a flight home from. We made it to the outskirts of town without any issues. The problems started when we tried to get to our hotel. We had chosen the hotel based on the fact it was easy to get to (how wrong were we!) It was on a road just off the main road through town. We found the turning to said road without any problems and got half way down it before it suddenly became oneway. Needless to say this was not the way we were going! I should point out that both Googlemaps and TomTom seemed unaware of this fact. It is an understatement to say that Tim was not pleased!

We thought it was best that we park the car and walk to the hotel. This was a good idea in theory but the hotel was not as close as we thought and it had started to rain hard. We then, in our stupidity, thought we could reprogramme TomTom to find it. Don't do this in towns with lots of very narrow one way streets - it only leads to disaster. Despite the fact we had a map, we could not find the hotel and we were constantly being sent down streets as narrow as the car, some of which were one way in the wrong direction. Tim must have turned the car around about 10 times. Because it was all so narrow every turn was a 10 point turn! In the end we we drove back to where we parked originally and set out to the hotel on foot. By this time it was absolutely pouring. We finally found the hotel. We dripped all over the reception trying to explain we could not find the hotel in our car. They issued us with a map and off we went to get the car. When we did finally make it to the hotel with the car we had spent an hour and a half looking for it. That was longer than it took to drive to Carmona from Cordoba!

At least we would be able to leave without any problems, or so we thought! We knew we would be able to drive down the oneway street we could not drive up, and we did. The problems came when we wanted to get back on the motorway. We had to get on in a slightly different place and when we got to the turning for the road that took us to the junction the road was shut! This was bad and to make matters worse there appeared to be no diversion. With the aid of TomTom we managed to wind our way round to the same road but further along only to find it was shut further along as well. In the end we decided to get on the motorway going the wrong way, better on the motorway than not at all. We turned around at the next junction and finally we made it to the airport where we then paid a £20 fine for not returning the car with a full tank of fuel due to all this detouring!

As the title suggests at least the food in Carmona was good and we did have 2 nice meals which was its only saving grace!

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Comments

[Rachel]

Oh dear! Sounds nightmarish but I had similar problems in Sienna trying to get to San Gimingnano (not spelt like that BTW!). Our map was rubbish so we had no idea where we were when we re-entered Sienna. After much driving about we managed to hail a taxi and followed it to the car hire place and obviously failed to refuel. WAINS! Driving in a foregin city...