Monday 4 December 2017

Monday 4 December - Laredo and Bilbao Port

Where's Bertie? He's in Lane 11 of the ferry queue for tomorrow's 10.30am sailing to Portsmouth (rough location: 43.35378, -3.07035).
Weather: Disappointingly, some drizzle this morning after a fair start. Clearing to sunshine later.

In anticipation of not getting much exercise over the next couple of days, we forewent our rest day and ran this morning. 'Twas a nice morning for it.

Dawn view from the beachside promenade, about 30m from Bertie.

That didn't excuse us a walk into town later. Those postcards weren't going to reach their destinations unless we bought stamps and found a postbox.

Our language skills are improving, and today, despite fluffing my lines a little, I managed to ask for stamps in a manner that got me exactly what I wanted without confusion (previously I've pointed to the corner of an envelope and muttered 'sellos'). We didn't do so well in the pastelaria, mainly because there were no labels for us to even try to describe what we wanted. Pointing came to the rescue and we came away (piggishly) with two cakes apiece. All have now been eaten. Oink.

Brittany Ferries opens check-in from 4-7pm on a Monday afternoon, before the Tuesday morning sailing, allowing people to stay in their vehicles in the queuing lanes overnight. That gave us an obvious and easy place to stay tonight, which will avoid the need for an early start or any stress about getting here in the morning. With the 50km journey here behind us, we had completed in two days (i.e. from Santander) a journey of 100km that took us 11 days in the other direction!

I can't say that the signage at the port was particuarly clear, but we managed to locate the one open check-in booth, and here we are. The next motorhome to pull up behind us was a Hymer B444DL - remarkable as that's exactly what Bertie is, and whilst we've encountered many others from the Dynamic Line (DL) range on our travels, that's the first other 444 we've seen.


I'll try to remember to write one more post, once we get home, reviewing the trip (not to mention the ferry ride - provided that I'm not too traumatised to mention it...), but given my past performance in blogging laziness as soon as we reach home, there's no guarantee. In anticipation of failing to pen that last post, I'll just record here that it's been a very enjoyable trip and we're both looking forward to returning to Spain at some point next year.

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