nothing fixed | 8 nights | from $2,150 per person
Asturias Vacation Package: Eight Nights, Nothing In The Diary
An Asturias vacation package for people who want beds, a car and an empty week. Eight nights on the wet green coast of northern Spain, where the weather is part of what you are buying.
What nothing fixed means here
We book the beds, the car and the road between them. Eight nights, three bases, and not one thing written into any day. You get up, look at the sky, and choose.
- Hours already spoken for
- About one hour on an average day, and that hour is a checkout and the drive to the next bed. On the five days you stay put it is zero.
- The earliest you must be somewhere
- 10:00 a.m. on day one, to collect the car. That is the only clock time printed anywhere on the trip, and the other seven mornings carry none.
- The longest stretch that is yours
- Sixty-eight hours. From the afternoon of day one to the checkout on day four there is nothing entered at all, and the two later blocks run 64 hours and 44 hours.
- Who chooses where you eat
- You do, at every turn. No guide is booked, no timetable is issued, and we do not send you a list of restaurants.
- What happens if you skip a day
- There is no day to skip, because no day has anything in it. Leave a base early and the night is still charged: rooms are paid ahead and nothing comes back inside 30 days of arrival, and the car bills per day whether it moves or not.
- Who this shape of day does not suit
- Anyone who will not drive. These eight nights do not work without a car, and the roads are narrow, wet and steep in places. It is also a poor shape for people who go flat when a day has no plan in it, or who need an indoor program on a rained-out afternoon.
The last row costs this company bookings and stays on the page anyway. A shape of day that does not suit you is far cheaper to find out about here than on the third morning.
What the $2,150 pays for
- Eight nights across three bases: three near the central coast, three inland in the valleys under the Picos de Europa, two back on the coast within an hour of the airport.
- A compact car for all eight days, collected and dropped at the airport, with damage cover already paid and no deposit held against your card.
- Route notes for 14 drives, the longest of them 95 minutes, with the two mountain roads that fog over by mid-afternoon marked as such.
- Parking settled in advance at each base: two have a yard, the third uses a paid garage 200 meters off, about $16 a night, and that $16 sits inside the price.
- A local number that reaches a person in Asturias who speaks English, for the days something is shut or the car will not start.
- One page on how a cider house works, what it does and does not serve, and why the pouring looks the way it does, because the first one catches everybody out.
What the price does not carry
- Flights from the US, priced on their own. Reckon $700 to $950 round trip in May, June or September, more in August, and we do not book them.
- Every meal. Two people eating in small towns run about $45 a head a day, less when lunch is the main event.
- Fuel and road charges, roughly $110 across the eight days at current pump prices.
- Entry to caves, gorges and the paid coastal lots, between $6 and $22 a time.
- Insurance, visas and entry paperwork. We arrange none of it and will not advise on it.
What it costs
from $2,150 per person
- Covering
- 8 nights, a self-driven week with an empty diary.
- Assuming
- Two people to a room, unless the six rows above say otherwise for your case.
- Pushed up by
- The month, the grade of room, how late you leave it, and how many of the hours you want somebody else to hold.
- Fixed when
- An operator puts it in writing with its own name on it. Until then it marks the bottom of a range that genuinely happened.
You settle with the operator, through whatever system they run. This site gathers nothing and no card ever arrives at this company.
Months that behave, and months that do not
Rain is the whole reason the place is green, and it does not take a season off. Plan on wet weather three to five days out of eight in any month of the year. June and September are the cleanest trade: eight or nine wet days in the month rather than eighteen, sea warm enough to stand in, and roads that are not full.
July runs warm and busy along the coast. The second and third weeks of August are the ones I would talk you out of. Most of Spain is on holiday, the coast road backs up between towns, and the rate on the same bed climbs about 40 percent for nothing extra. October still holds up if you accept that the light goes at six.
From mid-November to the end of February the daylight drops under nine and a half hours, the high passes close without notice, and a good share of the valley cider houses shut for the winter. An Asturias vacation package built around driving yourself is the wrong shape for those weeks, and I would rather you came in June.
What gets settled when you confirm
Four things move at confirmation. Which three towns the bases sit in, since the inland one shifts with how much walking you want at the door. Manual or automatic, a difference of about $190 over eight days and the reason most people change car size. Whether the nights split three, three and two, or four, two and two. And which airport you fly into, because coming in west of the region cuts 70 minutes off the first drive and adds them to the last.