Down from the Hills

271 miles, 28.5mpg

We got up reasonably early and packed the motorhome ready to go, before heading up to the ridge above the campsite to take in the views over Riano and the nearby mountains. It was another lovely morning, with blue skies plus a band of cloud across the mountains. Being over 1100m up it was pretty chilly though - chilly enough that there was mists rising from the lake. There might well have been a frost if we'd been up early enough to see it - we did see frost in some nearby areas that were in the shade.

Having checked the maps I decided to take the direct route back down to the coast near Ribedesella. This was an N-road and I didn't fancy trying to take the motorhome on any of the smaller roads, as the N-roads in the Picos are bad enough. The drive back to the coast was mostly ok though, especially as the traffic was very light for most of the way. That was helpful because there were lots of areas that it was necessary to go onto the other side of the road to get past overhangs etc. It wasn't until we were almost at the bottom of the windy & narrow stuff that we hit a problem as a massive tourist bus wasn't able to get round even minor corners without taking up both sides of the road and was even too wide to take just one lane of the narrow road. The driver seemed a bit crap as well, so I had to reverse our motorhome back up as far as I could until stopped by traffic - but even then the driver wasn't willing to try to get by. In the end it took a grumpy old Spanish local (stuck behind the bus) to do some shouting at the bus driver before he decided to have a go at passing us. The idiot bus driver actually started to that while Fiona was standing between the bus and the motorhome however fortunately she's nimble on her toes and got out of the way.

We'd originally planned on heading to a site on the coast at a place called Foz however we realised that it'd be just as easy to head all the way to Santiago de Compostela today. It was one of the main places we'd wanted to visit on this trip so made sense as we'd get there at 5pm or so. Fiona phoned the campsite we wanted to us (As Cancelas) and they didn't need a booking as they had loads of space. That was good because they're walking distance to the old town and the cathedral etc.

The campsite is well located and even has a good shopping centre (with a big Carrefour supermarket nearby). We spent quite a pile in there as supplies had got pretty low - plus I treated myself to a bottle of the Tanqueray Sevilla gin which I'd tried in London a couple of weeks back and liked. Being a city centre site the plots in the campsite were quite small however we found a pretty level one that could just about take our 7.5m motorhome and wasn't too hard to get into. The site even has a pretty decent pool although it looked doubtful we'd use it.

We did 271 miles today, which is the most on this trip so far (although I've done much longer stints on previous trips so wasn't a problem) but the big surprise was the fuel consumption for the day which ended up being 28.5mpg. That's the best we've had by miles, but is mainly down to the amount of descending we'd done coming down from the Picos - after 60 miles of that the average was sitting at over 37mpg!