Picos de Europa

128 miles, 21.3 mpg (worst on the trip so far due to all the climbing today)

It rained pretty heavily during the night and we had a rather rude awakening at about 7am when it sounded like some water was dripping into the motorhome. Turns out it was coming in from the hole where the wires lead into one of the lights, so looks like there might be an issue with the fitting of our solar panels! Will need to keep an eye on it, and I've removed that light fitting.

The weather was still quite poor so we had a slow start before refuelling (cheapest fuel so far at 1.245EUR a litre) and heading to the coast to investigate the area we'd holidayed in before, near Ribadesella. The motorhome was too big to try and find the house we'd rented (I recall the roads being quite tight even in our car) however we recognised a couple of the local towns we'd visited an eaten in - Llandres and Ribadesella. After some discussion (and with the crap weather expected to improve) we designed to double back a bit and head up to Potes in the Picos mountains, somewhere we'd also visited before.

Potes itself was pretty busy and with no way to park our motorhome we headed to an Aire in a monastery car park up some very steep roads only to find it was no longer allowed to overnight there. Quite sad as it was a lovely spot. We decided to give Potes a miss and head further up into the Picos to another town we'd briefly visited called Riano. This was quite an unusual place as it was built in the late 80's to replace a village that was flooded when a reservoir was built. It's an absolutely glorious spot but a little odd as it's very, very quiet. After a lot climbing and even more hairpins we crossed a pass at 1609 metres and started to drop back down to Riano which is still at 1169m. After we crossed the pass the bad weather was gone and we had glorious sunshine and blue skies!

We drove round Riano in the motorhome and spotted loads of

potential overnight spots but decided to stay in the campsite instead as it was pretty cheap (about 20EUR), had great reviews and was well located with lovely views over the town.

After parking up we dug out the motorbike and used it to do some exploring and some food shopping before heading back to the campsite for a beer at the bar and then some food (with a nice Rioja, given we're in Spain now!).

Not 100% sure what we're going to do tomorrow but probably we'll pack up early and then drop down to the coast and head west again.