The Spain Wandering - Day 11: Santiago de Compostela

Another driving day today, we made it to the city of Santiago de Compostela it's on the hotel is not even 400m from the cathedral. 

Parking is difficult in the city so we are paying for parking.  8 Euros/24 hrs.  Not bad, considering.

The hotel Wi-Fi isn't great and our cellular access is poor there.  No matter, we found other places with better signal, one of them being O'Galaico where I'm writing this while awaiting the dinner hour.

Around 4 pm we ventured out to do some exploring, we found the Cathedral easily but ended up also going in and taking pictures. It was raining all afternoon soon after we arrived.

The art museum which faces the front of the Cathedral and main plaza.  Some AI editing to remove the kids' carousel in front.

Near the building where the pilgrims check in for their final stamps signifying the completion of their "Camino"

The symbol of the Camino, the shell, can be found in many places near the Cathedral and of course guides pilgrims along the routes.

Santiago or Saint James

In case you're unfamiliar with the Camino de Santiago: LINK

More exploration tomorrow in hopefully drier weather though it's not looking good. 

 

The Spain Wandering - Day 10: Mountain Driving Day

Tuesday, April 29

No real objectives today after Martha determined during breakfast that a visit to a house designed by Gaudi, wasn't worth the time.

So, we wandered westwards.  Drove into the coastal city of Gijon near Oviedo.  No real reason, just see what we could see.

We parked in a paid parking lot and confirmed they scan your license plate when you come in to park. And then use that number to pay for whatever time you use and when the system sees you have paid they open the gate automatically when you come to it at the exit. Pretty slick. 

The parking attendant that was there provided this information to me, and also mentioned that the power outage yesterday played chaos on their system of course. They ended up just giving everybody a free day.

We wandered to the Mayor Plaza near the Old Town Center.

La Iglesona (big church)

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart

The city was bustling, hectic and a bit crowded.  We checked out the beach promenade area.

The day had turned quite warm and we decided to leave town as it was quite hectic and crowded.  Marta tried to find us a hotel close to the national park of Somiedo where there are some lakes to do some hiking by. It's also within the mountainous region of northern Spain.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at things we ended up taking the long way to our hotel.   

Turns out picking a hotel location on the small screen of a phone doesn't work for us while we are moving. The hotel in question when we got to it didn't work for us and we had to go and make changes from there.

I choose to look at it as fortunately since it gave us the opportunity to drive on some spectacular in terms of views and terrifying at times, in terms of narrowness and local drivers, country lanes.

There is apparently very little traffic on these country lanes (coded yellow on maps/signs), so the locals are used to using up all of what is euphemistically expected to fit two vehicles at the same time.

They also drive these roads way above the speed limit, if and when the speed limit is posted that is, mostly it was up to one's judgment apparently. 

 The fact that these roads are very twisty with lots of blind curves caused them to swerve when they spotted us coming at them in the other "lane".  

These roads allowed us to cross several mountain ridges, with tight switchbacks and incredible views once you were on top. 

We didn't stop a lot for pics, no real safe spots usually.

Let's just say we were happy to get to what are green-coded roads, where there are actual two almost full-sized lanes with marked centerlines!

We made it to the village of Samartin and checked in.

Dinner was at 8pm and I tried the Asturian Stew with Faba beans.  Tasty.

I'm almost, hopefully recovered from the Cruise Ship Crud.  Martha is fast behind.  Hopefully, our energy levels will rise accordingly.

The Spain Wandering - Day 9: Mirador de Sotres

We drove to the funicular at Bulnes this morning thinking that it would provide us with a better view of the Naranjo de Bulnes peak pictured in the last post.

It's a short drive from the town we're staying near at but when we got there the parking lot was full and it didn't look promising.  The cost was 21.50 Euros per passenger too.  

There was a road that kept heading up the mountain so we decided to see what was up there instead.

After several kilometers of a very twisty and narrow road (AS264) and nice views of canyon walls we came upon the town of Sotres.  A quaint little town that has a Mirador (viewpoint) of its own.  It's called Mirador de Los Jorcaos.

It was even awarded a historical preservation award by the king and queen back in 2024. 

A few Km from Sotres:

Hilly Farm

You can see the road we came in on far below.   I was standing about 300 ft from the Mirador platform at this point.

I was trying for a better angle on the below peak:

Sotres is a link in a national trail system.  You can see another trail zig-zaggimg its way up the mountain to the right.

Some of the locals watched us taking pictures:

A view of Sotres:

Another sleepy village further on, we think accessible by hikers only.  Probably by locals with permits, there was a sign saying no parking available.

We've also seen over a dozen+ descendants of the Suzuki Samurai over in this area.  Two door Vitaras and even a stretched body model:

It made me miss the Sammy.

Returning to the hotel, we noticed that the lights weren't working.  Hmmm.  I checked with the staff and they said it was out in the whole town and "welcome to Spain".

Chucking, I returned to the room and Martha said the news was reporting a power outage for all of Spain and Portugal.

Quite a big event for the country, we napped.

Ironically, cellular internet access worked while the hotel Wi-Fi went down.  I figured backup generators perhaps 

It work work till 6:30 or so when power returned.  Then, internet access went down until 8:30 pm.  No idea why.

We leave tomorrow....stay tuned.

I'm slowly recovering from the cruise ship crud I picked up, Martha is also experiencing symptoms and is about two days behind me.

The Spain Wandering - Day 8: Lagos de Covadonga Fail turns out good.

Through some miscommunication between my loving wife Martha and I; we went to the Lagos de Covadonga parking areas to attempt to get a seat on the shuttle bus to the actual lakes.

Turns out, Martha thought the picture I had sent her about a mountain was at the lake location, it was not. And I had not bothered to verify things with her beforehand. 

Just as well since neither of us was really interested in seeing those lakes and everybody seem to be so keen on.  Instead Martha soon realized one of the churches that was on her bucket list of things to see was actually next to the parking lot. I saw a cool looking Cathedral on the top of a hill that we ended up checking out instead along with a small museum.

It was actually a bit confusing in terms of transportation relating to getting into the lakes area. There were taxis, but you have to assemble a group of eight people. They were the buses of course but apparently they were all sold out because there's a lot of people doing pilgrimages and so on after Easter. 

So, no lakes, about a couple of crowded but cool churches that did not permit inside photography (Sunday Mass). The museum was mostly about the king that won the first battle against the Moors in the war to regain Spain from them. (I think)

More on Covadonga's history and significance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covadonga

Santa Cueva de Covadonga

Basilica de Santa Maria La Real

King Pelayo of Asturia

We left the area and retraced our route back to the town of Las Arenas de Calabres where Martha found us a room for the next two nights.

Nearby, by the somewhat amusingly named town of Poo de Cabrales, is the Mirador (viewpoint) Pozu La Oracion.  It provides a very nice view of one of the more famous peaks in Spain: Naranjo de Bulnes or Piccu Urriellu:

We got to the viewpoint just in time after a nice dinner at the Urgallo Restaurant near the hotel.

We'll be trying to get closer to the Naranjo de Bulnes tomorrow.

The Spain Wandering - Days 6 & 7

Friday, April 25

We drove the three hours or so to the small town of Panes.  I looked at it as the gateway town to the Picos de Europa (peaks of Europe) National Park.

Rainy and overcast day for the most part, we explored one of the trails to the south while waiting for check-in time at the hotel.

This the town we had a late lunch at, the place featured a serve yourself system for the Apple Cider for which this region is known.

Check out the wire bridge between nearby hills:

No, we didn't inquire further as to accessing it.

Dinner was not great as all the restaurants were closed due to holidays, just some sad Tapas.

Saturday, April 25

We checked out of the Panes Hotel ( Villa Elena) and drove down to the eastern end of the road which provides access to view the peaks.  At a small town called Fuente Dé we boarded a Teleferico or Cable Gondola.

It takes you up about 800m or so for a few peak views.  Several trails exist for one to wander away from the crowds.  Note: crowds weren't bad at this is the shoulder season.  It costs 20 Euros/ person to ride the gondola up and back.

Pretty good attraction, this gondola ride.  Pricey of course but it beats walking up!

We then returned back the way we came until we stopped at the town of Potes.  We had a big lunch (it's the main of the day you know, when in Spain).

The first place was a Risotto ai Fungi, quite yummy too.

Martha found us a hotel nearby and we went to check in as it was almost 4PM which is also the end of the Spanish lunch hour (2-4 PM).

Martha went off to explore while I tried to rest as I'm still coughing pretty badly at times.  In a sign of approaching decrepitude I managed to pull a lower back/upper right buttock muscle while in the midst of a severe coughing session!

The pain associated made my later attempt to swiftly rendezvous with Martha an utter failure!  Google maps had me wandering in circles in the medieval part of Potes which flared up the muscle pain when coughing....good times, but not for Martha.

Her support and patience will be noted in the post-trip addendum for her sainthood paperwork.

Most of these pics are by Martha:

Here's the view from our third floor room at the Hotel Toscana:

In spite of my kidneys I asked for 4 x Ibuprofen from Martha.  I had to get rid of the muscle pain so I could wildly cough without accompanying shooting pains.

More touring of the Picos de Europa tomorrow.