Next day

After an awful nights sleep on the reclining chairs, and then the floor, we clocked in at Santander around 12.30pm. We waited our turn like cattle to disembark. People were busy falling over straps, cables, boots etc whilst at the same time packing their bikes. After an hour we were let loose onto the steaming hot streets of Santander.

After talking rubbish with a chappy on the ferry, we decided we should take the coastal route to Llanes. We took a few wrong turns and had to double back a few times whilst I became accustomed to using my GPS.
Anyway, we made our way into the Picos and took in a couple of easy trails, which we all found easily manageable. The next one was a bit tougher. I went up a fairly steep trail, which was quite loose under wheel. Carly came up followed by Ian. Once again, we had to double back so I went down first, then Carly, then no one. Carly and I waited but there was no sign of Ian. After what seemed like 5 minutes, but was more like 2 minutes, I went back up to find Ian. Whilst turning the bike round, Ian had dropped his bike and had struggled to pick it back up, c’est la vie.

Later on we found a camp site at a place called Riano that had a few log cabins available for 35 euro’s, what about that then? It was while we were getting unpacked that Ian decided that he would like to stay on the big roads instead of the trails. So, he made the decision to have a blast to the south coast of Portugal. The old XT and the even older CD weren’t really up to the rigours of high speed cruising so Carly and I decided we should stick with plan A and stay on the trails.