Day 5 Friday 19th July
I slept poorly last night which surprised me as the day’s riding – as well as the high anxiety of arrival was exhausting – and sleeping conditions were perfect – dark and silent (unlike London).

This is a small, intimate place, a beautifully restored old stone building with a fairly newly planted garden – some familiars like fig trees and olive trees. A young American couple are also here who are committed hikers. They leave today. Its misty this morning and I am restless unsure whether to hang about here and read, to go for a gentle walk or to get on the bike, brave the exit and steep re-entrance and take a quick blast down to Santiago de Compostela. I noticed that there is a Galician gin and I’d like to try to find some to bring home. So its either today or tomorrow to do that as on the third day – Sunday – I ride back in an easterly direction to hotel number 3, just north of the Picos.

Today I rode to Santiago de Compostela, mostly a pleasant ride but with some lost-getting due to the GPS mistaking a dusty old track for the trunk road that had been converted to a brand new motorway. As ever, taking a motorcycle into a big city where parking is difficult is not an enjoyable experience. In fact following a hastily entered location – the Cathedral – into the GPS I found myself riding up a steep cobbled lane to the front of the church surrounded by a sea of tourists feeling that my large motorcycle was rather out of place. So a hasty U-turn and I headed off back down the hill and out of the city via a stop at air conditioned Lidl. Returning here involved a similar ride to yesterday down a bewildering labyrinth of narrowing lanes, often covered with cow shit and gravel, between ancient buildings and beside stunning small churches made of pitted and dissolving stone and strange walled graveyards. Finally, my entrance up the steep gravel footpath went successfully. The garden here is beautiful. I can see it has been planned and planted maybe five years ago. With my new slight awareness, I actually know the names of some plants and trees – but not the beautiful pink flowering bush (see previous post) that greets you as you arrive at the top of the drive.

This evening two German walkers have arrived and we engaged in conversation sitting outside with very welcome early evening drinks – in impeccable English of course and they even spoke to each other in English in my company. They were dry and very funny (he told me that he had lived in a squat in the centre of London in the 1980s).  Now that’s cosmopolitan. With the Americans last night who, apart from a brief (one word) greeting, were locked into their own private (self-concerned) conversation (sitting feet away from me), I was starting to ask myself – is it me? But people are so different.
After another dinner, I spent some time sitting on a stone bench on the terraced garden overlooking the drive and facing the sun, warm on my face, as it sinks slowly behind the hill. At 9pm, the sky is still a pure blue.
Tomorrow I will give myself a day off the bike in the sunshine and shade and perhaps walk back to the small church that I rode past this afternoon.

It’s another lovely clear cool sunny morning and I’ve breakfasted and worked out that the journey to the next hotel, Casa Camino Turismo Rural (honestly, it gets great reviews) is between 3 and 4 hours away, in a westerly direction, mostly on main roads with no obvious nicer routes. I can hear the wheels of the room cleaners’ trolley in the corridor outside so will start to pack up (the food and drink in my fridge) and pack up the bike before it gets too warm. 

I’m here at Casa Camino Turismo Rural. It took 4 hours and 10 minutes of riding to get here.

The most enjoyable parts of the journey were when I found the N120 going west out of Carrion. The vista was golden. Even the tarmac was orange and weathered. A little way from the road is a gravel footpath where pilgrims walking on the Camino were to be seen, alone, in pairs or in small groups, typically with backpacks, sunhats and a walking staff, but good things come to an end and it was kind of inevitable to join the motorway for this long journey west. I stopped at a bleak service station and ordered café au lait with the only edible thing on view – a chocolate covered doughnut (actually pretty tasty) – but got served with a slice of tortilla which (all for around €2) I ate greedily sitting uncomfortably on a bar stool, feeling a bit uncomfortable. Was there a headwind or are my earplugs starting to shrink? The wind noise was tiring. In fact the whole journey ended up tiring with over four hours of riding. The end was also the nightmare scenario – the GPS taking me first off the motorway, and then onto progressively smaller and more isolated roads and track and when it proudly announced ‘arriving at destination on left’ there was nothing to be seen – just a field. Google maps came to my aid and I drove around a large circle of lanes past two tractors and just overshot the steep gravel entrance to this hotel. Getting up it involved some anxious and high revving turns and wobbly blast up to the top (all captured embarrassingly on helmet cam where it looks so easy to just go – which is what I didn’t). And while I was searching on my phone I could see I had missed a phone call of something unexpected to deal with from home. So my arrival was a bundle of anxiety.

But I am in my room now, welcomed by a nice Brit who makes this feel like being personally welcomed into his home (which I suppose it is), with an offer ‘to eat with us’ meaning with the pilgrims and other guests who frequent this hotel (there were two young American walkers). It will be interesting to see who turns up at dinner and whether there will be conversation (there wasn’t). I was thinking, on watching the walkers this morning, that many do this walk for deeply personal reasons, not seldom to do with loss – expected and unexpected – as my friend David pointed out quite a few years ago. In fact seeing them brought tears to my eyes as I rode.

(edited vids to come – I promise)

Last night I loaded two trips up to the Picos and back again, onto the GPS. Today I rode those routes, 229 miles, 6 ½ hours of riding. The trip starts out with about 30k of dead straight road, but it is rather beautiful, in a golden landscape and with almost no other traffic. You see your destination, the Picos de Europe in the distance that gets ever closer until you are winding up ever tighter bends, then round a stunning turquoise lake on your left at Riano. But a twist takes you from bright sunshine into low cloud and the temperature falls to about 15 degrees, then there is green again and you are in Cangas de Onis. That’s where I fill up with petrol in a slightly grumpy petrol station and afterwards park up by the road by a car wash and munch my baguette and cheese and speak to H on the phone about the death of a friend of a friend.

So I am heading into the second, longer route that I plotted, on this road AS-114 east to Panes, then a turn to the right, south towards ever-busy Potes, then after missing my turn in the town centre, and turning round, a fork off to the left and back into the mountains. Lots more turns, most of them easy in 3^rd or 4^th gear but one or two in 1^st gear including a famous lookout that I remember riding through on my last trip in 2013 only from the other direction – but it was covered in low cloud then too and nothing was apparent to be looked at apart from the statue of the animal – what was it? A giant hare? After this point the road surface gets worse and big trucks full of gravel are blocking one lane. The new stretches of tarmac, never more than a mile, are lovely to ride on though without centre lines which are important on these twisty roads where vans and cars often come toward you taking up more than their own lane. Eventually I get down to flat ground at Guardo, tired from that type of riding, and really relish the long straight back to where I am staying.

I will post some edited footage from the helmet cam soon.

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I’m writing from my desk at Hotel San Zoilo otherwise known as Hotel Real Monasterio. It was a four-hour ride over here from Port Bilbao but because I left so early I arrived at about 1.30 so it felt like just half a day.

I slept so much on the boat, soundly on the first night till nearly 8.30, a couple of hours later that day then, knowing that we would have an early start, I got to bed at 9pm and slept mostly till the announcement at 6.15. Its kind of a scramble to get a few dozen noisy motorcycles up the ramp and off the boat but, true to my Germanic gene I was first down on the vehicle deck and had my bike un-strapped, packed up, GPS on and ready to go before anyone else even arrived. There was a bit of handshaking and then one by one we launched ourselves up the ramp and off the boat and into the beautiful Spanish morning. The most popular bikes on this journey were cruisers and Harleys that make a racket. I just watched my video of the exit and my BMW sounds positively polite in comparison.

I got lost even before I got out of the port, thinking that a barrier meant no exit when in fact it raised up as each person went through (what a metaphor for my life), then it was up and over the mountains that lie just along the coast here and then on plains in a south-westerly direction, with one stop for coffee. The place was playing loud music FM. I am glad I bothered to struggle loading my route into the GPS yesterday as it lead me for the most part on lovely riding roads, all bathed with a beautiful sun. When I started the journey it was 15 degrees but pleasant; when I arrived it was 28. Spain seems to have a kind of parallel road system, unlike the UK. The new European-funded motorway runs a couple of hundred yards from the old road from A to B. There are not many cars on the motorway, a few trucks maybe, but there are no cars at all on the old road, which makes them so relaxing to ride on. This town Carrion de los Condes is a mixture of ugly new build, dilapidation and historic, the hotel being in the latter category – and a river runs through it – which local lads were jumping into. The hotel is part of a beautiful building, beautifully restored and the owners have tried to keep, or rather recreate or imagine, an atmosphere that suggests history and monasticism.  Mostly it is rather nicely done but there is canned plainsong in the reception and bar and for a split second I thought it was real but which I imagine gets very tiresome after a while. The wooden shutters were closed when I unlocked the door to my completely darkened room. I couldn’t work out how to open the window but the room, to my surprise, has air-conditioning which I’ve resorted to sparingly. After settling in I asked Google the way to the local supermarket and walked down there for some provisions for my ride tomorrow. I plan to try dinner here tonight. Tomorrow is my day on the Picos de Europe, which draws many bikers to this part of Spain. My memory of my last visit in 2013, I think, was fog and scary hairpins. Lets see if I will be more at home six years later. I seem to have plotted two routes – one there and one back with relative ease – though its a total of nearly 5 hours riding. Then the following day I head over further West-North-West to a hotel between Lugo and Santiago de Compostela.