Tuesday 10th September
I made it! I am on the ferry, now just less than one hour into our voyage and we’re definitely swaying.
Last night was the usual sleeping and dreaming and waking but the alarm on my watch, followed shortly by my phone went off when it was still dark and felt like the middle of the night, just after 7 and with the aid of my trusty head torch I was packed up and ready to ride out as I heard the campsite gate being opened just before 8. But it was dark and raining on the road and really difficult to see, out of town and up onto the motorway for a 35 minute journey to the port just this side of Bilbao.
Laredo to Bilbao in the rain at EveryTrail

It was difficult to find the way to the boat, as the whole portside area was under an inch of water so all the road markings were invisible and I rode around in and out of cones and lanes to finally get to the route to get into the Brittany Ferries queues. Phew. Please take queue number 43, said the woman in the booth. By this time I was soaked. I joined a queue of riderless bikes and wondered what shelter everyone had found. A lorry driver called to me that all the other bike riders were sheltering in the café and I walked over and squeezed into a small bus shelter like space already full and a half dozen or so bikers came before we got the call ‘now the motos’. Someone there was sharing his experience of travelling the middle East: ‘I went to Dubai airport once. I thought I was at a shepherd’s convention’. Much laughter. Interesting. When you are new to a group or on the edges its always the vocal members that you notice and assume they stand for the whole.
Driving on involved a steep decline down to the very bottom deck, which with the wet weather, caused widespread fear as I could tell from the rider in front of me and the comments of others. I stayed to watch Bertha get tied down then managed to get into my cabin just after it had been cleaned, saving waiting around in wet clothes.
After showering (with the ship’s many times laundered and barely there towels) I made straight to the restaurant and watched from the window as the last trucks drove on down below and we moved away, diagonally it seemed, from the quay. A lone remaining worker in bright orange stayed in the rain to see the boat leave, then got into his van and drove off. All the immigration police had already left a good half an hour before.

I ordered full breakfast in French (its ‘full breakfast’ but to be said in a slightly artificial way). I normally avoid all that but after a fortnight of crouching over a stove eating various varieties of pasta (they were all delicious – I am not complaining) I was not going to skimp on comforts for this 24 hours.
So now in my rather swaying cabin (I have a porthole this time), with the heating turned up and my clothes hanging on anything available to dry, I am going to start looking at some documents for the university’s Research Excellence Framework. I’m hoping the 130 mile ride back up to Cambridge tomorrow morning is dry.

Pictures so far are here.

Weds 4th September part 2
I have decided to move on tomorrow. The weather forecast says thunderstorms for the next few days though it was, and still is at after half past eight in the evening deliciously warm and sunny. But I feel I have to take the forecast serioiusly. I swam in the sea today. The beach was so delicious, warm sun yet constant cooling by the breeze and no flies. But to turn back toward the ports feel like the beginning of the end of the trip though there are still 6 night before I sail home.
Having given up Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Being and Time, I’ve turned to ‘Venture to the Interior’ by Laurens Van Der Post. He starts off by writing about flying to Africa from Health Row Aerodrome (in 1949). The book deals with British colonialism, as the other Laurence did, though post second world war not in the lead up to WWI. Of course I have no part in this, but my mother came from Germany the year before his story starts and my sister was born only three years after. So all his discussion of the role of Britain in the world and British values of decency ‘a nation should try to be fair, good and true, not merely an industrial sausage machine’, would sill have been in the air when my parents started their family. But I’m not sure I feel nostalgic for his vision of British virtue: only on page 44 so far, and with limited knowledge of the issues affecting post-war Britiain, I have the feeling that interest has always shaped British action, though it used to be dressed up with rhetoric of value and decency. I think people actually believed it themselves.
As I started cooking I heard the residents of the convent singing hymns, their harmonies wafting over the garden wall.

Here’s the map. More to follow: Up to Finisterre at EveryTrail

Last night I ventured up to the terrace bar for a drink and to write up some notes. When the young guy working as a waiter put something to nibble (tuna and some twirly pasta) on my table I decided to risk dinner. I was hungry. I went for the mirage of the aroma of cooking meat and the warm buzz of company. I learnt – never again. The food ‘marinated pork and potato’ turned out to be daunting in volume and poor in quality – the potatoes were actually chips. I was challenged to finish even half of it.
Afterwards, with the sun just setting I walked down to the beach. Now, unlike earlier in the day when it was hot, bright and crowded, now it was beautiful, deserted, the tide just up and on the turn, a lovely light just before the sky lost any colour, the quiet lapping of the water around the rocks. This moment, like the walk up to the stations of the cross seemed to say to me that there are moments of involvement to be found but they are unlikely to be in searching for involvement in what others seem to find attractive. I first sensed this about 40 years ago and still don’t seem to confidently believe it.
This morning I am still suffering from last night’s dinner. I rode up to Finisterre, the most westerly part of the peninsular in search of 1. A supermarket to buy some fresh produce after a week of not seeming to find any and 2. What I imagined as the lonely lighthouse on a crag with ample parking and few people. I can tick off number 1 – I could even park right outside the door but not the second. Despite two attempts, all roads seemed to end in the congested and cobbled little town sea front awash with people walking out in front of the bike and other people trying to park anywhere. There were also many pilgrims to be seen who had obviously gathered to much spiritual momentum on their walk to Santiago that they were unable to stop walking and hopefully managed to stop just in time before the ended up in the sea.
On the way back I got my always mysterious helmet cam to work for the first time on the trip. As a triumphant finale I manage to turn up into the steep and narrow street leading to the campsite under smooth control – unlike my first arrival.
Once back here at lunchtime, I see the place is filling up again, with three new tents in the field down here, two guys with the radio on (strains of double-stopped violin, ‘music clasique’ says one of them without turning it off, then a family of three – the third being a small annoying girl. Then interestingly a couple riding a Honda Pan (Pan European – if you are not in the know) with GB plates. They turn out to be Scottish, pleasant, him fit, an ex-competition cyclist and she, ironic, funny and dealing with their apparently huge amount of washing. There were two conversations going on – the men talking about motorbikes, cycles and fitness and interjected conversations between me and her about the washing machine having broken down – I tell her she will have to buy a complete set of clothes now.
Later, after a few halting pages of Being and Time and swatting flies, I went down to the beach with my swimmers cunningly ready beneath my zip offs (in zipped-off mode; you see, I have saved bringing two separate pairs of trousers; the legs have colour-coded zips). I discovered its actually beautifully breezy down there and lay in the sun and sneaked into the sea which is cold. It’s the Atlantic not the Mediterranean. I also notice that while many people walk up and down in swimming costumes very few actually get into the water.
Postscript on my failure to find the lighthouse. The wonders of GPS and Google earth showed me just now exactly where I went wrong on the road. I need to decide whether to retrace my steps tomorrow or to take another winding coastal jaunt in a southerly direction down the coast to the Cape of Arousal. The attractions are obvious. Excuse me while I find my zipped-off legs.

This campsite closes next Monday and is almost empty now. It wouldn’t surprise me if I am the only one left at the end – though I’ve been trying to plan a route back to Bilbao but that’s not till next week, or the end of this week.
Time, Being and Time. Time passes slowly when you are restless. After breakfast up on the lovely terrace and saying goodbye to the intrepid cyclists who were aiming to do 70k today and who saved me from solitude, I started reading Heidegger in manageable chunks, and swatting flies from my salty body and having innumerable showers and then ventured out on foot – twice. Orientated towards finding a supermarket and the beach I had failed to notice a residential convent next door – just the other side of the stone wall. There was a very catholic 19th century chapel, cool inside and the sign Reception over a door which I did not understand at the time. I did notice the stone path up the side of the hill in front with pillars containing plaster reliefs of the stations of the cross (just to remind you: Stations of the Cross (or Way of the Cross; in Latin, Via Crucis; also called the Via Dolorosa or Way of Sorrows, or simply, The Way) is a series of artistic representations, very often sculptural, depicting Christ Carrying the Cross to his crucifixion in the final hours (or Passion) of Jesus before he died, and the devotions using that series to commemorate the Passion, often moving physically around a set of stations. Thanks to Wikipedia), so of course I started to climb to the top, through all 14, through the recently burnt out undergrowth (it still smelled of charcoal).



What an amazing sight it must have been when the whole hillside caught file and those 14 pillars survived, just needed a fresh coat of whitewash. I’ve just noticed I can see the convent from where I am sitting by the tent, though a gate. There’s nothing going on there. I climbed up my personal Golgotha all the way to the top. What a change of mood from the beach and search for a supermarket. And what a strange story. Is this a very good metaphor for life, an uphill struggle, to an ultimate cruel death and being laid in a tomb? Its formalised – how many times did Jesus stumble? Like my 14 days in Spain, I’ve stumbled three times, coming to an abrupt halt with a struggle to keep Bertha upright. And why did the soldier give him vinegar, not water or wine? Vinegar seems to go well with the overall bitterness of the story. (Apparently it was used as a kind of painkiller to prolong death on the cross and Jesus refused it – which I had forgotten.)
Tomorrow I will ride up to Cape Finesterre – its not far – then back down the coast . It does look beautiful. It was good to rest today but some boredom crept in.

Today was a tiring ride of about 120 miles and riding for three hours of twisty hairpins over the mountain on the way there and less tight but busy roads on the way back. There’s a scary cable car at Fuente De which appears to take people into the sky and leave them there. Potes looked lovely. Its medieval apparently but it was heaving with not a spot to part Bertha so I kept on the move.

Tomorrow I leave here and head over West towards Galicia, aiming for a campsite near Cudillero, near the coast. It is mysterious to find: the GPS coordinates in the guidebook lead to France, my GPS doesn’t put the postcode and the address together and the road directions are ambiguous. Still, I feel like moving on.

Here’s the route I took today, there and back combined.

To Fuente De via Potes at EveryTrail

I made it here. We all got off the ferry safely, and one or two conversations about whether F800 BMWs are more easy to ride than 1200GSs, I was through customs (bikers had their own policeman to wonder around us checking passports). Then it was 33 miles and just under an hour’s ride to the campsite, with the usual doubt that it really knew where I wanted to go as it started to get gloomy. I arrived about 8 in time to buy provisions and something to drink and cooked using my new space-saving cooking pots as it got dark. The site is lovely, quiet, rural with its own donkey and goats, whose bells you can hear ringing. It is set in a steep valley and the style of the buildings is rustic. Its crucially not crowded and there are only one or two motorhomes, the rest of the inhabitants in tents, albeit ones you can stand up in. There’s a little café here, a bar, open to 11pm and a small shop. I intend to stay here until I feel like moving on and take a ride around here to see how intimidating the roads are climbing up through the mountains. It rained briefly just after I got into bed but the sun is up now and its already feeling warm, due to my choice of place to camp, I think my tent will dry off last.

Santander to Cabuerniga at EveryTrail