After a few days in Bilbao, it was time to hit the road west and what a road.

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Jaw-dropping scenery from Bilbao to Santander to Gijon and beyond. The road is high with sea and white sand beaches to the right and forests and mountains to the left. We drove from Basque country through Cantabria to the region of Asturius. The infrastructure was amazing with viaducts, beautiful bridges, long tunnels and best of all, no tolls, on this route – a truly wonderful drive …..and the car kept going although we have taken to parking on hills in case we have a repeat of the episode getting when we were getting on the ferry.

We set up camp for the night outside Villaviciousa in Asturias – some other campsites nearer the sea were full and when I say full, I mean jammed – barely room to walk between tents although they would probably have squeezed us in somewhere. It was mid-August and a holiday weekend. We put up the tent under the trees and then discover that we have forgotten to bring the camping chairs and table – we have left them in our garden shed. We had been complimenting ourselves about how well we had packed. Now we knew why everything fitted so well into the car!

After one night camping and sitting on the wet grass (it rained all night – the only rain for weeks), we moved on, still following the coast with the blues of sea and sky to our right and the greys and greens of mountains to our left with a mist blowing over the Picos. There were tiny coves with towering cliffs and red tiled houses clinging to sloping mountainsides.

We stayed with a relative – my brother in law’s mother, Luz – for a couple of nights in her house about 10kms outside Villalba, an inland town in Galicia but which is on the Camino del Norte. The countryside around here was green with hedgerows of wildflowers (very similar to home) and small farm holdings with a few cows (with enormous horns) and farmers driving old tractors. There were rows of windmills on the horizon and mixed forestry plantations. But the countryside was also dotted with lots of large, deserted houses – substantial buildings with peeling paint. Sometimes there were several clustered together in small, deserted villages. Fine houses that would be habitable with a little TLC are left to crumble and decay where their (usually) elderly inhabitants die.

Luz and her partner, Manuel were so welcoming to us. Luz lived in England for about twenty years and has excellent English. She fed us, did our washing (we were travelling fairly lightly and may have packed too few clothes!) and helped us get a new car battery in Villalba, bargaining with gusto so that we got a good price – fingers crossed we won’t need to park on hills any longer and worry about the battery dying. We also bought camping chairs and a table, so the car boot was full again and so we were all set to camp in relative comfort.

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