Six hundred kilometres to Barcelona in an Audi SQ7 Diesel

Three in the morning is not a time. It is a state of mind. The kind where the road ahead stops being a road and turns into a long grey ribbon lit only by your own headlights, and everyone in the car has gone quiet in that very specific way people do when they are too tired to talk but too wired to sleep. That is how we rolled into Barcelona, seventeen hours after leaving Madrid, in a diesel Audi SQ7 that had, by then, earned the right to be called something other than a rental. We were four. My wife, my mother, my father, and me, along with the kind of luggage a month-long European trip demands, which is to say, far too much of it. That single fact decided the car before anything else did. This was never going to be a two-door, low-slung, look-at-me kind of drive. We needed something that could swallow four adults and all their bags without anyone’s knees touching the seat in front, and still make the distance feel shorter than it really was. The SQ7 diesel turned out to be exactly that. For one very long day, it was our living room,