Salamanca got us into Bilbao’s harbour at the appointed time of 08:00. Motor homes are loaded down on deck 3 along with trucks so we were amongst the first to be called to disembark. Mercifully that got us out and into the immigration queues before the swarm of motorbikes that were also on the ferry.
I should explain. On our first trip to and from the Netherlands in 2022, in a solo car, we had disembarked behind a swarm of motorcycles. Here’s the problem: bikes take forever to get through passport control. First they have to remove gloves and dig out their passport. Then they have to remove their helmet so the image likeness can be checked. Now you have to reverse the process, replace helmet, stow passport, replace gloves, before moving off to allow the next motorcycle rider to go through the same laborious process. 20 of them burns up quite a lot of time.
One of the motor homes disembarking with us looked like a bit of poser. Some motor homers are in the habit of towing a car on a trailer behind their £100K motor home; this so they can go shopping and play tourist once on site. This guy was towing a Porsche behind his motor home. Strewth!
We were impressed by the efficiency of the Spanish at passport control. The whole business now being longer courtesy of the stupidity known as Brexshit, all passports having to be stamped, one guy was wandering down the line of those waiting, collecting their passports, opening at the relevant page and standing them in front of the guy in the kiosk doing the checking. It worked, we were soon on the roads working our way out of Bilbao.
Prior to departure, we had checked for suitable supermarkets en route to fill our woefully empty fridge. We’d spotted two almost side by side at Miranda de Ebro. One of these was a Spanish Mercadona but that looked like a restricted car park. The other though, was a French Leclerc with more accessible looking parking. It would also give a Francophile pining for his beloved France a bit of a boost. We spent an hour stocking up on food and booze before continuing our journey to Burgos.
Our new Spanish electronic tag for the toll roads worked like a dream. The Spanish system seems considerably more sensitive than the French system, which we also have. There is almost always considerable delay involved in the French system before it registers, beeps, and raises the barrier, causing the occasional heart failure. The Spanish system sees you coming before you get there, beeps and raises the barrier in plenty of time.
Francine programmed the satnav with our chosen campsite from those logged in the satnav’s memory bank, Bliss, it worked and we arrived to get our first experience of checking in to a Spanish campsite.
I have serviceable camping French; not so camping Spanish so I was a little nervous. I needn’t have been ‘cos the folks on reception spoke great English … and German, and probably Dutch. Having booked, we paid the balance for 5 nights and were directed to a large area of electric pitches. We could just pick one; reception didn’t need to know which one. We chose one and lucked out with Frodo being level without the need to work at it and hooked up. Power was on.
We’re here. The pitches are not generous by French standards. 100m2 is typical in France but here in Spain, 80m2 is often touted as normal. Some of the campers seems to have difficulty figuring out where the edges of the pitches are – are the pitch numbers on the edges or in the middle – so parking can get a bit free-form.
Two of our purchases at the Leclerc supermarket stop were bibs of wine, one white and one red.
Another was a 400g pack of prawns, which we thought would make an excellent lunch. Since our bib of white would not cool down in time, Francine bought a bottle of white from the handy-dandy campsite shop (and very good it is, too).
Later in the afternoon with lunch and white over, we thought we’d switch to red. We opened the bib of red which should’ve been fine at room temperature. Gag! This so-called wine would not have been any good at any temperature; it was a dirty brown, cloudy colour with awful amounts of sediment swimming in it. It was quite simply disgusting and entirely undrinkable. The only thing to do with this was to use it as drain cleaner, which is pretty much what it tasted like.
Francine went to our pleasant on site shop to buy a bottle of something decent.
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