Saturday 16 January - Santa Pola

Where’s Colin? He’s at an ACSI campsite at Santa Pola at N38º12’3” W0º34’13”.

As of yesterday morning, the plan had been to have one more stop before we reached the Med coast, to avoid the need for any long days of driving. However, after last night’s very cold night I looked at the forecast for tonight’s stopping point and when I saw a sub-zero temperature it suddenly looked attractive to spend a whole day driving so as to reach some warmer weather sooner.

As long journeys go, they don’t get much more straightforward than getting from Segovia to Santa Pola via the route we took. On the road at 8.45 and arriving at our destination at 16.30 (with stops for coffee, lunch and grocery shopping on the way), all bar about 5 minutes of the day were spent on very good roads. None even approached what I would consider to be busy (not even approaching Madrid in what might be considered ‘rush hour’), and one in particular stood out as being a newly built motorway where a motorway is not needed. This was its almost constant state:

In about 40 kilometres on that road, we didn't even see 20 vehicles (and that’s counting the ones going the other way too).

The scenery was interesting, and once we’d passed Madrid and cleared the enormous plane beyond, plenty of rugged, lumpy bits were to be seen all around us:

Quite a few castles standing on rocky outcrops were seen too. This one was the best (yep, dreadful photo; these snaps were taken out of Colin’s windows whilst we doing 60mph and this one partiuclarly suffers from a reflection in the window):

The campsite we’re on isn’t of a sort that I would ordinarily choose. It has 362 tight-packed pitches and most are in use. However, the location worked for us today and it did mean that we were able to get pitched, replenish Colin’s water tank (manually, via bottles and a funnel – today we had the right size connector for the tap on our pitch, but the tap was too corroded to use it), have a cup of tea and still get out for a stroll before dark. In fact, we set out just at sunset and having finally found our way to the marina, we managed to just catch the end of the colourful display over the water:

Friday 15 January - Segovia

Where is Colin? He’s in a free Aire in Segovia at N40º56.449 W4º6.475. There’s a waste point and a tap here, but the tap is underground so requires a hose to use it and we don’t have a suitable fitting for it. Good job we don’t need any water today*!

Towards the end of last year I read a blog post from a couple touring who stopped off at Segovia and, upon seeing their photos, put it on my list of places I wanted to visit whilst in Spain and today it fitted nicely into our route.

Leaving our campsite just a couple of minutes after the Tenerife-bound convoy rolled off-site (which itself was just a few minutes after daylight hit), a short hop of under 3 hours brought us to the Aire in the car park of the bullring in Segovia.

Had I realised that the Google Maps App doesn’t north-orientate its maps (is there a setting I’m missing?), we set out for the town in the wrong direction and, having put ourselves right we missed the start of the aqueduct, which was the very reason we were here. That meant that rather than first seeing it as it starts to become elevated, on initially very small arches, we came upon it at its most impressive point, as it towers above the town:


It’s not really curved at this point – that’s just a feature of having the phone stitch together a panoramic shot. Here’s a less-curvy snap of just a small section of it:


The entire aqueduct is just shy of 15km long, of which just under 1km is elevated above the ground. At its tallest it is 28 metres, and it comprises 166 arches. All impressive enough, but the bit that I find quite incredible is that it was built around the end of the first century AD, and was constructed without the use of any motar. I say again: incredible!

That isn’t the only visit-worthy feature of the city either. Of note there is also the cathedral…

…which maybe we should have visited inside (€3 a head), but as I’ve only just warmed up from yesterday’s visit to Burgos cathedral, and as it was even colder out today (just 4 degrees), we just walked around the outside on our way to the castle. Having read about it as a fairytale castle (i.e. Disneyesque) I was a little disappointed, but maybe it looks more fairytale when parts of it aren’t wrapped in scaffolding and netting. The view from there back to the city, over the city walls, was certainly worth seeing:

Walking back towards the viaduct, the wind was positively biting, so it was no surprise when a few little flakes of snow started to fall. That was our cue to duck into a cafe for coffee and cake.

Following the aqueduct on the way back to Colin was a much shorter route than our meandering inbound one and I would share some photos of the ‘small arches’ end of the aqueduct if I hadn’t taken them all on the camera rather than on the phone.

And now, as the sun sets, making the walls of the bull ring (itself apparently a very old building, although I’ve seen no inforamtion about it), there are four motorhomes parked in its car park. It’s quite multinational, with one each from Italy, France and Spain, plus us.

(*Ah! Spoke too soon there. When we got back from our tour of the city earlier we vaguely talked about using the last hour and a half of the day to move further south. It wasn't till dark that (noticing that it was getting quite parky) I looked at the forecast and found a prediction of -5 tonight. Having considered the options as to how to stop water freezing in the bits of Colin's plumbing where it could cause damage, I decided that draining down his entire system was the best option. So, we really could now do with being able to refill in the morning.)

Thursday 14 January

Burgos was chosen for today’s destination, purely because it was directly on our route and had an open-all-year ACSI campsite. We’d decided that a bit of electricity would be beneficial to charge a few batteries (too many electronic toys, that’s our problem!). Mick reckoned that a proper shower wouldn’t go amiss either.

Getting a ‘as soon as it’s daylight’ start (i.e. nearly 9am), the three hours of driving, broken up with a coffee break and a number of stops at fuel stations (we were on a LPG mission and had a couple of false starts due to me seeing a cheap price on the board, making a split-second decision that it must be LPG, only to then find that it was biodiesel at a silly-cheap price*), was unremarkable except for this bit, through an impressively rocky area:

Arriving at the campsite, we’d no sooner got ourselves settled than a convoy of seven British vans rolled in (turns out that they’re on their way down to Tenerife for 2.5 months). By the time it got dark there must have been 30-odd motorhomes and caravans here, the overwhelming majority of which are displaying British registrations. My theory is that a ferry from the UK came into Santander this morning, and this is an obvious stopping point when heading south – but maybe it’s this busy with Brits every day.

With the campsite being just a couple of miles upriver from the city of Burgos, and with a path leading the whole way there, after a quick lunch off we set to see the cathedral, which our guidebook says is ‘one of the most extraordinary achievements of Gothic art’.

Into the city, we passed down an avenue of conjoined trees (branches of each one have been historically spliced with its neighbours):


Through a city gate (where I did read the information sign, but all pertinent facts have now fallen out of my head):

And onwards to the cathedral, which was indeed such an impressive building that we decided to part with some pennies (€14 worth of them, in fact) to see inside.


The audio tour is comprehensive and lasts over an hour and a half, taking you around the most ridiculous levels of religious opulence which this building houses. It really is an incredible place, and well worth the entrance fee. The only downside of the tour was that I got so cold with all the standing around that by the time we emerged (into the balmy 6 degrees outside) I was so cold that I’d lost all feeling in my fingers.

It wasn’t the cold that prevented us from exploring more of the city (which was apparently a candidate for European City of Culture for 2016; a quick Google tells me that it was San Sebastian which was selected), but the short amount of day remaining. So, back upriver we walked, at a very fast pace which failed to get the blood back into my fingers; they were still numb when we arrived back, although hugging a cup of tea soon did the trick.

(*We paid 94.5c/litre for diesel, which equates to 70p/litre at the current exchange rate. Later we saw it for 86.9c/litre. The LPG set us back 59.5c/litre and no doubt we paid for the quantity which sprayed back over my hands as I decoupled the nozzle. It’s why Mick insists it’s my job to fill the LPG.)

Wednesday 13 January - San Sebastian

Where’s Colin? He’s still exactly where he was yesterday.

By luck, we hit on the perfect day for exploring San Sebastian. With the rest of the week having been (or is forecast to be) wet, today was fine, with lots of sun first thing,and with tremendous air clarity. The latter feature of the day was particularly welcomed from the vantage point of Monte Urgell, a small pimple which juts out into the sea just beyond the old town of San Sebastian.

Here’s how the day went:

After looking over to Monte Urgell…


…we surmised that the man writing ‘IBI=+P’ very neatly all over the beach was making some political statement…


…but we couldn’t say for sure what it was about, whereas Mick did understand this bronze sculpture of Don Quixote, even if he couldn’t quite recall his sidekick’s name:


On this fine day workmen were busy pollarding the trees lining the promenade, some of which looked quite old (the trees; not the workmen), with their split trunks being held together by ties. I was particularly taken with the tool they were using for the purpose: pneumatic secateurs.


After a walk along the harbour wall, into the old town we went, which is built on a very neat grid system after having been razed to the ground by a fire (by the English & Portuguese) in 1813.

Through the square we went…

…past the basilica…

…and into a bar to sample some pintxos (or tapas). There was much more than this snap suggests:


Suitably fuelled, a circuit of Monte Urgell warmed us up for an ascent to the castle which sits at the top, on top of which sits a rather large statue:


The air clarity gave us exceptional views, including snowy peaks in the distance, and I even caught Mick in a snap:


Lots and lots of pathways cover this little hill, with plenty of signage giving the names of the various batteries and other features.


Descending via the English Cemetery (from some ructions in the 1830s, the details of which I didn’t note), it was back into the town for another bit of a wander before calling it a day. We did that at about the right time as about half an hour after getting back to Colin the rain, forecast for this evening, came early

Tuesday 12 January–San Sebastian

(Oh dear! It’s only day 3 of the trip and we just had a lengthy and indecisive conversation about which day of the week it is today – a discussion which was only resolved when I resorted to technology to tell me.)

Where is Colin? Colin is sitting in an Aire (with free service point) next to the university in San Sebastian at N43°18.481 W2°0.867. Cost per 24 hours: €3.25.

We were up bright and early this morning, determined to get away at a sensible hour. Unfortunately, the sun didn’t have similar ideas (and we hadn’t put sufficient thought into sunrise times (0848 in Bordeaux)) so we found ourselves sitting around waiting for enough daylight to creep into the day. It was, however, on the very stroke of ‘yep, that’s enough daylight to drive on side-lights’ that we pulled out of the Aire and back onto the N10.

A bit of playing around with route finding tools last night had told me that taking non-toll roads down into Spain was going to take just over 2 hours longer than taking the toll roads, and would be tiresome in terms of roundabouts, traffic lights and hundreds of changes of speed limit. The toll roads would cost €14.40 if we were in a car (I couldn’t (and still can’t) find any info online as to the cost of a van), which seemed a reasonable price to pay for the conveniene of arriving at our destination with enough of the day left to go and see something.

So, down to Spain we headed, paying tolls as we went (thankfully these toll booths accepted Mastercard; yesterday’s didn’t), which worked out at just short of €23 (a €3.40 car toll came in at €5.30 for our Class 2 vehicle).

It was as we were approaching the toll gates at the French/Spanish border that we saw a distinctive hill ahead of us and immediately recognised it as La Rhune – the hill on which we spent part of our first night on the GR10 last July, until horses chased us away for a midnight walk down to the nearest town. Funnily enough we spent that night in a motorhome aire too; all we were missing on that occasion was a motorhome…

The distinctive shape of La Rhune ahead of us (it may not look that distinctive in the photo, but it is a poor shot, taken through the windscreen, in the rain)

After just a small amount of navigational confusion when we arrived in Spain (“I shouldn’t be allowed to navigate. I’m crap at it!” I stropped, perhaps a little too melodramatically, all things considered. Turned out we were on the right road after all.), we were soon pulling into the Aire in San Sebastian and consulting a weather forecast so as to inform our plans. If tomorrow was to be good weather, then we would stay here for 2 nights and spend a day exploring. If it was going to remain poor (it was lashing it down as we sat here having lunch), then we would take a walk in the rain this afternoon and save most of San Seb until our return journey, in the hope of better conditions then.

Fourteen degrees and dry said the forecast, so a ticket was bought for 2 nights and off we headed to see ‘El Peine de los Vientos’ which our guidebook describes as a remarkable and unmissable sculpture. Alas, it was missable for us, because the authorities had decided it should be so:

Being rained on by this point, after a promising sunny interval, it was a moody view over to the Isla de Santa Clara and the old town beyond:

We probably would have wandered over to the old town if the next dry spell had lasted, even though that’s the main event for tomorrow, except that half way there the skies turned very ominous and once again we were getting wet. By the time we’d walked back we were positively dripping, and a cafe seemed like a good location to dry out a bit. It would have been a good plan too, if we hadn’t sat out an entire sunny interval and set back out in the next shower. Hey ho…

Monday 11 January - Roullet Saint Estephe

Where's Colin? He's at a free aire, with tap and waste point, at 45°34'51"N, 0°2'40"E.

Considering our proximity to the church last night, I was pleased that the hourly chimes only disturbed my sleep twice, or three times if you count the final alarm call at 7am, when they didn't just chime the hour but went into a more frantic 'you really must wake up now' mode of clanging. We may have woken, but there was no sudden leaping out of bed; after yesterday's long day, a lie-in was in order.

Even so, we didn't intend to be quite as late away as we were, and by the time we'd done two rounds of a supermarket so huge that it was almost a city (a list would have avoided needing to go back in a second time!) and filled up Colin with diesel (100.5c per litre – a whole cent higher than it was when I walked past yesterday evening), it was nearly eleven o'clock.

It was another driving day today and Mick took the first shift (he takes most shifts, because he prefers for me to navigate), which took us past Tours. It was on our approach to the city that I made the executive decision, in my position as navigator, that we were going to save ourselves all of the stopping and starting in going around the city by splashing some cash on a short section of toll road. Twenty-three kilometres later and with my pocket €3.50 lighter, it was back off the motorway and back onto a 'normal' road.

With hindsight, we should have splashed more cash, as the D910 between Tours and Poitiers was incredibly tiresome, and I can say that first-hand, as I was driving for that section. With either traffic lights or roundabouts every couple of minutes (sometimes much more frequently) and with speed limits changing almost as often, it was far harder work than driving should be. It was with joy that we got onto the N10 with the SatNav telling us we were staying on that motorway-esque road for the next 75km.

We didn't get that far. Our ETA at the destination I'd programmed into the SatNav this morning was 5.20pm. Wanting to arrive somewhere with enough daylight left for at least a cursory look around, I had another search once Mick had taken over the wheel, and redirected us to the Aire de Camping Car where we are currently located, just a very short amble outside of the village of Roullet Saint Estephe (which should have an accent grave over the second e of Estephe, but I can't work out how to insert one). Unlike last night, when we were alone in our substantially-sized car park, this Aire already had three vans present when we arrived and there's at least double that as I type.

So, another load of witter there with even less to tell than yesterday. I'm sure we will do something interesting sometime soon – once we get the bulk of the driving done and start exploring. Hopefully by then we'll be somewhere with better weather too – very heavy showers and the odd flash of lightning has been the order of the day today, with some bright sunshine blinding us in its reflection off the wet roads – oh, and (as Mick now reminds me) one area of hailstones laying deep enough to narrow the road down to a single lane.

Today's photo is of the church in Roullet, which is far enough away from us that whilst its bells are audible, they hopefully won't be disturbing.

Sunday 10 January - Saint Denis les Ponts

The view from Colin’s passenger seat as we approached Chateaudun, the nearest town to our current night-stop

Where’s Colin? He’s at a Free Aire with toilet and service point: N48º3’59”, E1º17’22”
Sometimes I’ll find myself sitting in a comfy chair in the warmth of our living room in deep mid-winter, plotting out a route for an upcoming long walk and, from that nice warm sitting position, I will adjudge that in a few months time we will quite fancy consecutive long days walking pathlessly over hills. Unsurprisingly, when we find ourselves on the ground faced with going arduously up and over, we’ll look at the plotted route and wonder what I was thinking when I came up with it.
In a similar vein, I now wonder what possessed me to book a EuroTunnel crossing which required us to check in at just gone 6.30 on a Sunday morning. I can’t even blame having booked it in the warm, sunny long days of summer; in fact, it was only booked a few weeks back. As we retired to Colin’s bed at a little after 10 last night, with the alarm set for 4.30am, the early crossing didn’t seem like such a good idea.
As it went, a monstrous headache woke me at 4am, so I was raring to go (or at least to get up and search out some suitable painkillers) by the time the alarm went off. After necking a cup of tea apiece, filling the flask and using my new toy* to clear the condensation on the front windows, off we set (from Crawley, where we’d spent the night outside Vic & Juan’s house) for Folkestone.
We set out with the cab-fan on max, which may seem like a superfluous bit of detail, and it’s not something I would mention, except that when we came to turn it down after a couple of minutes, we found that our 4-speed fan had become 1-speed. It’s happened once before  (about this time last year, if I recall correctly), but on that occasion it only lasted for one journey and has worked just fine ever since. Maybe it will start working properly again in due course, or maybe it won’t, but if you are going to have three of the four speed settings on your cab heater fan break, then ‘max’ has got to be the most useful one to retain. We made do as we wended our way south by intermittently blasting ourselves with heat, before turning it back off to cool down again. Not entirely comfortable, but it could be worse.
Arriving at Folkestone just in time to catch the shuttle before the one on which we were booked, we arrived in France only a tiny bit later than our originally scheduled time. We don’t have vast experience of the tunnel, but when we have used it, we’ve always been delayed, but at least getting on an earlier shuttle minimises the chunk taken out of the day.
Having been flashed by a speed camera within about 5 minutes of entering France* (I won’t disclose who was driving, but if it was me then it would be my first speeding ticket ever; if it was Mick it would be his first in 24 years. Google suggests that Brits caught by cameras in France currently get away fine-free, but only time will tell). That led us to pay a bit more attention to road signage which, coupled with what the SatNav was telling us, led to some confusion. After passing a 50 sign, we would pass no other sign, but the SatNav would tell us the limit had increased to 90. Likewise, we would pass an ‘end of 70 limit’ sign (i.e. 90, or 80 if it’s raining) then without any further signs, the SatNav would tell us we were in a 50. It took a visit to Google to remind us that the ‘You are entering Place X’ sign means the start of a 50, and the ‘You are leaving Place X’ signals recommencement of the National Speed Limit.
As it went, we weren’t on little roads going through every village for too long and even though we avoided all toll roads, for a good chunk of the day we were on dual carriageway, and occasionally free motorways.
Having set out on this trip with very little by way of a plan, whilst Mick drove I pored over the map and our German-language motorhome parking book, ruing the decision not to buy a dedicated French Aire book (we’re probably only going to spend 4 nights of the trip in France, so it didn’t seem worthwhile; on reflection, of course it was – we will be back) and came up with Saint Denis les Ponts as our destination for the day. The Aire here is right on the side of Le Loir (which is running quite high at the moment).

Le Loir, l’eglise de St Denis les Ponts et Colin le Camping Car (if you look carefully, he is in shot)

Thank goodness sunset isn’t until 5.20pm here, as our arrival (at 3pm) coincided with a prolonged rain shower of almost biblical proportions. My step count at that point only stood at 600, and my unbroken chain of hitting my Fitbit step target stands at 379 days, so there was no question of not going out for a walk, but I really didn’t want to go out in *that*. Nor did I much want to go out in a strange place in the dark. At twenty past four the rain stopped and by the time I stepped out it was under blue skies. Four degrees C, said a local temperature display.
Well, that’s probably enough wittering on for one day – moreover as it’s a day when we didn’t actually do anything!
(*A Karcher window vac, bought half price and during a Clubcard double up at Tesco, meaning it only cost £14.50 in vouchers. To my mind it not only gives a good and quick way to clear the windscreen in the mornings, but it also effectively turns the windscreen into a nice big dehumidifier as rather than the accumulated condensation getting transferred onto a towel and then released back inside Colin, the water can now be collected and put down the sink.)
**The SatNav said we were in a 70; seems that it was actually a 50. We certainly weren’t going obscenely fast!)