Day 1 - Santander to Laredo

Distance cycled 23 miles

Nice calm crossing from Plymouth to Santander, which was just as well as there was NO proper provision for securing bikes on the flagship, Pont Aven. Hopeless! (Brittany Ferries, you will be hearing from me when I return). Nevertheless, a few drinks and a nice evening meal and breakfast put us in good shape for our first day on Spanish soil.

After disembarking, we heeded the warnings made by other bike tourists about avoiding Santander city traffic and took the local ferry across the harbour to start our tour on the city's outskirts, at Pedrena, the home village of the late Sevvy Ballesteros.
The ferry lark was not without incident as we mistook the one we needed to get on for another and watched ours sail away, giving us a 30 minute wait for the next. Dohhh!

The weather was beautiful (19C, although it clouded over mid-afternoon) and within 5 miles we were on the main N634 east.
Before that, we stopped a few times to watch cranes (the birds, that is) rummaging in a grass field, as the farmer was cutting and baling, and red kites, as well as various other birds of prey.

Although a relatively major road, the N634 runs next to a large motorway which takes most of the traffic, leaving "our road" not as busy as it used to be. The hills were not as bad as feared either but they did tend to go on for longer (for gradients, around Redditch, think of the Bromsgrove Highway and around Plymouth, the A38 from Marsh Mills towards Ivybridge).

Having left Pedrena at 1.45 pm we reached our hotel just short of Laredo just after 4pm, so another nice ease-in with a higher mileage to Bilbao scheduled for tomorrow.
We are staying at the pre-booked Hotel Las Ruedas which looks friendly and comfortable and the bikes are hopefully safe in the hotel's luggage store.
Apart from one other hotel in Brittany which we've booked for a night, we'll be looking for accommodation at the end of each day's cycle, with the tents as back-up.

Thanks for the kind wishes, Steve, David, Gareth, Hannah, Caroline S, Rob H, Andi Lonnen, Jackie, Justin, Simon, Clare, Roz and Steve (and apologies if we've missed anyone). Andi, yes, I'm on Twitter but no-one follows me so I don't tweet much but thanks for spreading the word.
Thanks also to Julia, Gill, Rob & Gill B for seeing us off at the ferry terminal yesterday......and to the Lee family, Rob feels awful for drifting away quietly yesterday (and I haven't let him forget it) but as you know him so well, when I joked that there was a Sky News team in Modbury, Rob took it seriously, ticked the "no publicity" box in panic and scarpered quickly, leaving me to try to catch up! It was Yealmpton before I caught him.

Pictures: The boat behind the bikes is the Pedrena ferry that we should have caught! The other picture shows us on the next ferry.