The simplest way is to fly into and out of Barcelona and travel 50-minutes by train to and from Girona.

The best months for this trip are April through June and September through early November.

Spring and fall are just gorgeous times to come. If you're heading down the Costa Brava and passing the Aiguamolls wetlands, then spring and early September are when there are more birds in town. The grape harvest tends to be early in September, whilst the beech forests of Garrotxa are glorious in October as the leaves turn golden.

Given that this trip is designed to have you out walking and exploring, we tend to advise you give the height of summer and depths of winter a bit of a wide berth. It's too hot and busy in July and August, a bit too chilly in the winter. Rainfall is consistently quite low - too low actually as Catalonia is regularly experiencing long droughts - but the coast in particular has a bit of an 'out of season' feel in winter and it loses a lot of its buzz.

We spend a great deal of time visiting, staying in and getting to know the best hotels in each area we visit.

The hotels you will stay at on this trip tend more towards the premium end of the scale. That's not to say they're fancy for the sake of being fancy, but rather we know you'll have a warm welcome, a big comfy bed, a great location and a bit of peace and quiet too. We even throw in an inviting pool or some top-notch cooking along the way.

This is very much a trip designed to have you out and about, exploring on foot. In between quite active days, you tend to have easy rest days as you move between destinations.

In Girona, that's simply a case of ambling the medieval streets and stopping for coffee/lunch whenever the mood takes you.

In Garrotxa we advise you to do the circular walk from your hotel. It's a decent walk at 11km but importantly it's pretty flat, so it's a fairly easy one.

On the coast, the walks are shorter and tend to lead downhill steadily. There's usually a quiet cove or two to swim in on the way if the sun is shining on you.

All in all, this is a comfortably active trip, but you always have the option of changing plans and using your car to explore instead.

Once you get out of Girona, which you'll do pretty quickly, the roads tend to fall quiet and traffic is usually very light. We love driving in Spain because of the freedom it gives you. That could mean changing plans over breakfast, or simply pulling over at the side of the road to soak in a view you might otherwise have sailed straight past.

As the roads are generally quiet, smooth and scenic, it's designed to be a pleasurable part of the experience, rather than a price to pay for said freedom.

For two people traveling to Spain you can expect a medium-sized vehicle such as a VW Golf. We can’t guarantee specific make or model.

Some vehicles have sat nav built in, but we find the best way to navigate is simply to use Waze or Google Maps on your smartphone. These can both be used offline to avoid data charges and your phone can easily sync with your car's Bluetooth so that it talks to you through the radio. All in all, it's not really much different to navigating in a part of your own country you've not been to before.

That's very much the idea yes. Beyond the time you spend with your local hosts and guides, the spirit of this trip is very much one of discovery and so we assume you'll enjoy striking up conversations with the locals as you go. The places you visit offer a good balance between being well-established enough as tourism destinations to be able to communicate in English, and small/away from the crowds enough to necessitate a bit of 'Spanglish' to get by. It's all good fun and all very authentic in our experience.

No, your hosts speak English perfectly well. In busier areas of the main tourist centres like Girona, English will be widely spoken. In smaller restaurants and in villages and the countryside, it is spoken infrequently and Catalan, rather than Spanish, is the dominant language. Saying this, it isn't a problem, people are invariably happy to work out how to communicate.

As part of the creation process, we also have designed a 7-day version of this trip. So if you have less time to play with, the first step is simply to look at this itinerary, which removes the last two nights on the Costa Brava. Beyond that, we can tailor the trip in certain ways, making sure that we retain the essence of this holiday through the pacing and content.

Using the high-speed train network, it's also easy to add time in cities such as Barcelona, Madrid or Paris (as mentioned above) to either end of the trip.