Day 2. Tuesday 3pm 16th July From the port of Bilbao to Carrion de los Condes

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Trip to Northern Spain (photos and vids coming later)

On the way to Bilbao Day 1. 15th july 2019

Leaving London on the A3 is getting familiar now, Elephant and Castle then Kennington Park Road (they seem so far away now and unfamiliar), Clapham, the surprise that Wandsworth is so far west, then Kingston bypass then speedy dual carriageway, the possible delays at Guildford, then the surprisingly nice scenery before Peterloo and finally the efficient M road that takes you right down to the roundabout entrance to the ferry port, past the hotel I stayed in many years ago before an early sailing.

On my arrival at the port a traffic steward warned me that the sailing was delayed but I got in the queue shortly followed by an affable Danish couple riding a BMW 1150RT, who, amongst other things recommended Poland as a beautiful and inexpensive biking destination – they go to get their teeth done there. The sun is shining and the temperature is in thelow to mid twenties.

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In front of me was an Englishman, living in Spain riding a Harley, with a kind of sub-hells angels jacket. He told me how it is always him who gets stopped and searched at security. Then a middle-aged couple from Manchester riding a diminutive and immaculate white scooter with designer suitcases strapped fore and aft. She is wearing a pink hoodie and matching shorts. He is similarly dressed in hoodie and completely unprotective gear. They are very funny. We all spend many hours conversing – because the delay seems to expand until the sun has gone down and it is dark. In the security shed we actually have to open ‘one bag’ each that a woman searches through with a torch, neglecting any other spaces. Then we are lined up under the glowing late evening sky to watch seemingly endless trucks, cars and motorcycles pour off the delayed and just docked boat that we need to board. This is very tiring and I am hungry by this time. I tried walking around, sitting on a step, leaning on the bike but there is no avoiding the fact that this is rather miserable.

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Finally, unexpectedly, we get waved on at 11 o’clock and about 40 motorcycle engines fire into life. Up the ramp onto the boat and then, one by one, down a steep ramp to the very bottom of the boat where we will have to all turn around when we leave and ride back up the steep ramp into the Spanish sunshine. I finally get to my cabin after going up then down then up again, hot and hungry and needing to plug everything in to get charged up. I drag out and bite into my Neal’s dairy wholemeal baguette and open my bottle of vinho verde, no longer chilled but cool enough and with its welcoming gentle fizz.

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By this time it is 11.30. Very many cabin announcements follow, including a description of how to get into a life jacket where every phrase is repeated twice to give you time to think about it. Finally I climb into bed well after midnight and see I have drunk nearly the whole bottle of wine.

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I woke up, slowly, to see that it was 8.30. We would stop at Roscoff at 9 to change crew. Not wanting to miss the sight of land, I made for the bar here for a (not very great) coffee and also not that fresh croissants then spend an hour swapping from sunny side (warm) to port side (better view but chilly) decks to see the crew leave in dribs and drabs pulling suitcases on wheels until the boat pulled out to sea.

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So, before we get off tomorrow morning, I need to work out, using my GPS and paper maps, an enjoyable route to my first hotel.

Later. My alarm is set for 6.45 (Spanish time). It took about two frustrating hours to work out how to load a trip into my GPS but with any luck I have an almost non-motorway route planned to my first hotel – which looks a little gem in the middle of a quite un inspiring town to the west of Burgos, with one or two interesting monasteries to visit en route. Before the struggle and after my petit dejeuner I lay on the bed here and dozed at first on top and eventually underneath the duvet where I fell asleep. I must have been tired. Today I wondered around the boat and started reading H is for Hawk. It is a brilliant start and because you know in advance that it is about loss its opening, mentioning the dismembered bodies of baby birds that never hatched, is harrowing. It will not be a book that takes weeks to read. Luckily I have packed another novel. I wonder what balance of riding and non-riding I will find on this trip.

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Getting ready to ride in Spain

On Sunday I sail on Brittany Ferries from Portsmouth to Bilbao for a couple of weeks riding in northern Spain. I’m leaving the tent at home for a change and have booked four rural hotels, all interesting, I hope, in different ways. Not camping means I can leave all this lot in the cupboard:

In fact this is a picture from Google earth of my first hotel:

Hotel Real Monasterio de San Zoilo

I was feeling a little sad at missing out on the camping experience but this photograph looks like an intriguing place. Does its name mean that it is a real monastery, not one of those fake monasteries with fake monks who turn out to be actors?

When you are immersed in working and living – as is too easy, these trips can come up out of the blue almost in a strangely unwelcome way – paradoxically – as an interruption to the numb mindlessness of routine. But getting out maps and packing the panniers does start to dissolve that.

Unusually, the sailing down to Bilbao is two nights, a chance hopefully to disengage and get into a new headspace.

Ride to Thorpeness, Aldeburgh and Orford

A long day and some promise of sunshine led me to take the bike from Cambridge out to the Suffolk coast to three places that I had visited before but separately, in order of arrival, Thorpeness, Aldeburgh and Orford. Apart from a deluge of rain early on, the day ended with sunshine to greet my arrival. Thorpeness and Aldeburgh are lovely English villages and full of tourists with a long stoney beach and a short straight beach road between them.

Orford ness has a strange topology and a stranger past. I’ve never seen the derelict buildings of the old atomic weapons testing site and by the time I usually arrive there (I see that the last time I visited was nearly 2 years ago), it is cold and I’m ready to return. I’ve also never worked out how you get across the spit. The seafront where I parked up has a small tea room, rather characterless I thought but in a lovely location.

I edited the four hours of sometimes cold riding to a 4 minute video.

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Back to Cambridge

Its Spring. The clocks have leapt forward, the sun is shining – weakly – and its time to bring my bike out of hibernation in London and ride it back up to Cambridge into my increasingly expensive to rent garage, where it will stay for the next 8 or 9 months – apart from when I’m riding it of course.

Riding and driving in London is not fun. Most other road users are fine but there are a few who are crazy or seem to be testosterone-fuelled idiots. Mainly, its just that there are so many other people trying to get somewhere. My route up the A10 is not as fast as the motorway but once past the M25 traffic starts to thin out and it turns into an enjoyable road past the turn for Hertford. The sun came out too. I’ve not been to Cambridge since before Christmas and it was nice to arrive back, each return and there is an extra block of flats and one more building on the Addenbrookes site.

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My next major trip will be in mid-late July, after graduation, when I take the ferry from Portsmouth down to Bilbao again and spend a couple of weeks riding and this time tent-free, staying in hotels across northern Spain including near to the Bardenas Reales that I’ve heard so much about.

I’m still trying to solve the problem of decent audio on my recorded videos on the bike and wind noise seems to drown out my voice, even with the helmet vent closed and a new and better microphone. Here’s the trip in 4 minutes.

Box Hill by Motorcycle

The first piece of sunny weather and it was an opportunity to get back on the bike since before Christmas. Also an opportunity to test a new helmet cam, the Sony FDR-x3000. Its hugely better than the Contour Roam (Contour seem to have brought out a new camera – I thought they went out of business): it has better resolution and takes much nicer looking footage, is smaller, has a much better mounting system and I can plug a helmet mic directly into it. Probably the best feature is the remote controller with a small screen that mounts on the handlebars and saves feeling around in a gloved hand for an on switch somewhere on the side of my helmet. It was a test run so all didn’t go entirely to plan.

After reading brief recommendation I headed down to Box Hill in Surrey, just the other side of the M25 (which if you walk around I have heard you get a tour of London’s old asylums at a safe distance from the capital). I should have done more research because my webpage did not mention probably the main draw for motorcyclists which is the Ryker Cafe, run ‘by bikers for bikers’.

As said before, riding out of London in any direction involves many miles of driving through congested roads and then unattractive dual carriageway before getting to anything remotely rural. This time my journey passed nearly every Northern Line station going south towards Morden. But the more I do it, and the more familiar the route gets, the less I notice it and the quicker the journey feels.

The camera worked well, though just when I got to the picturesque, the never-ending circle of dots on the remote screen told me that the camera had already used its battery – of course I had a couple of spare with me. So I have fantastic footage of various tube stations in south London. Not having really looked hard in enough in advance I stopped at the worst possible establishment (there was a last space in the crowded car park), called Smith and Weston for an orange juice and a chance to search on Google for why my GPS was not working properly (clean the contacts someone wrote, even though they look clean – which I did and found it worked). My route out of there led me past two much more interesting looking stopping places, down through a couple of hairpins, and past Ryker’s Cafe with a carpark heaving with motorcycles of various styles.

The camera saves GPS data which I think you can only embed and render onto the footage using Sony’s movie making software which, apart from being able to do that, is not very good. Solution: save the file then import that into FCP to properly edit and the speed and other data remains on the screen.

The whole trip was just over 50 miles and was a lovely way to spend the first Spring-like day and the first riding day of 2019. Wimbledon was strangely deserted. Here’s a screenshot of the route.

to Box hill and back

Here’s the GPS track, strangely just for one direction (not the band):

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Here’s the footage I took: