Round the bend....

We’ve gone round the bend…south and west from France, around the curve in the Bay of Biscay and into Spain! A first for the Tollers and me, and first time in about 42 years for Gary (apparently), so a new peninsula and Country.  My knowledge of all thing Spanish could fit on the back of a postage stamp, but is rapidly expanding – maybe this evening a book of stamps!

Yesterday (Sunday) was a beautiful sunny warm day in France, as planned we chilled and enjoyed a couple of walks in Urrugne. After all how many times do you get to go to a place name starting with a U? The  Larrouleta campsite came highly reccomended, and it did what it said on the tin…but the environment seemed so manmade it was a bit surreal…maybe it is the naked structure of the trees?

Our Hymer enjoyed being snuggled up to by another (French) Hymer who arrived after us, and in true gallic fashion parked up less than a metre from our windows. Thankfully they kept the blinds drawn “our” side and we only saw the occupants when they were leaving this morning. And for those not quite so motorhome savvy …this is in part due to our main door opening on the English side (i.e. the wrong side over here) and thus either we park the other way round to all the other vans or we end up with our door opening towards another van…..

This morning our departure from France was heralded by damp miserly rain, low cloud and basically windscreen wipers worked for the whole journey until we stopped for a late lunch at Bermeo. We had intended to stop the night on the Aire there, a small town on the coast near to Bilbao, but the low cloud and rain meant we couldn’t even see the sea, never mind find our way around on foot to explore.

Over lunch we took the serendipity approach which is so much a part of the motorhoming ethos….we changed tack and considering the weather forecast (rain on and off along the coast for the next few days) we decided to press on southwards towards Burgos where there is an open campsite. One factor was that after some reviewing of our criteria for overnight stops, not that many places are open at this time of year, take multiple dogs per pitch, and for later this week have decent wifi (as I have to do some work online).

So this afternoon we decided to chase the sun southwards and set off around the Bilbao ring road, complete with roadworks. Spanish driving is going to take some getting used to – different speed limits apply to all motorhomes, they have quite specific laws about not crossing white lines….and it seems enjoy having traffic merging /peeling off either side of the carriage way. The Spaniards also seem to enjoy different interpretations of the road signs to what we had understood from a bit of reading up before crossing the border….ahhhh….we had also read that the standard of driving might be (as it was euphemistically termed) “not quite up to British standards”…..no kidding!

With only one minor hiccup of a missed turning, we exited the big city and started on the motorway out towards the south. This rapidly got more interesting with snow covered mountain tops appearing, and the landscape turning, well.....more Iberian. My notion was that it reminded me of the ITV Sharpe series about the Spanish Peninsula War …during the early 1800’s, so bang up to date then…..

Never mind, as we continued eating up the miles on the motorway, we broke free of the gloomy weather, climbing up to see blue skies and sunshine ahead…this principle of flexibility and going south to seek winter sun is working! And to bring us up to date, at one point we could see five different wind farms….which left us both shaking our heads wondering why they didn’t cover the hills in solar panels down here at these latitudes…guess it’s the better subsidies!

We pulled into the campsite at Burgos, the only open one for about a hundred miles to find a nice site, half full of Dutch and English outfits in the middle of a large country park. We will have to look at the weather forecast and may decide to stay a bit longer to explore…the Tollers already approve of the walks, the onsite cats to watch from the van…Gary likes the park enough to want to go for a run tomorrow morning….Serendipity strikes again.