Heading east to Bilbao

We were going to complete this trip in an anticlockwise direction, which would have meant following the coast westwards from Bilbao, travelling first through the Picos de Europa and arriving in Asturias early in the holiday.
However the weather wasn’t promising when we arrived in Spain and so we headed south. This meant that the Picos were going to be last on the itinerary and as we would be making a fairly fast bid for Bilbao, it would be a snatched view only. From our final camp at Luarca, it would be a four hour journey on the motorway and the latest ferry check in was 16:30 so we felt there was time to detour to get a glimpse of the mountains.
Asturias is beautifully situated where the mountains meet the sea. The houses look alpine and the villages are scattered amongst the meadows and fields. Just a few kilometres inland, the ground rises steeply and we headed off the motorway and up the first suitable road, to see what views we could glimpse.

This is typical of the scenery through which we passed, there are steep mountainsides and deep valleys with big streams and rivers flowing through them. The temperature shot-up as soon as we got a barrier between us and the sea and we passed all sorts of canoe / kayak activities and lots of swimming in the rivers with the temperature touching 30c here.

The TomTom route planning facility is very handy and it gives options for travel avoiding motorways, fastest route etc. but it defaults to the maximum allowed road speed. When on the motorway, our expected arrival time keeps slipping back as we don’t (can’t) cruise at 120 kph and I always forget to reduce that maximum to 90kph. Therefore the arrival time in Bilbao kept slipping and got nearer the 4:30pm deadline as we cruised the hinterland.
Here are the Picos in all their 2,500m glory...

and this is “the picture”, the one that you always see in the winter shots.

So we raced to Bilbao and in fact found time to re-fuel at the same station that we used on the first day. I had kept the receipt for the whole trip because rather surprisingly it offered a €10 discount off a re-fuel of at least €30, an absolute bargain. So I pumped in 50 litres at €1.069 per litre and got the tank filled for about €43. Why not?
So to the ferry, with the shade temperature at over 30 we were happy to be waiting for just a few minutes on the concrete.

This is M.V. Baie de Seine and we are on the "Economie Service” which is a little cheaper than the full-blown service we experienced coming out on the Cap Finistère. So there was no posh restaurant, no cinema and no pub quiz. We didn’t miss them.
In fact this ferry is quite small and you can really feel the Atlantic rollers as you cross “the Bay”. In fact I ought to mention Atlantic rollers - they haven’t been referred to, so far. It’s amazing to see the size of the swell. The power of these innocuous waves coming in is quite surprising. As they hit the beach or the rocks they seem to come from nowhere. Row upon row march in from wherever they form and thats without any gale on top of them to create white caps.
We ate our Stugeron 15 pills to settle our stomachs just in case. I don’t know how they work or what it would have been like without them but we slept all night. Sometime in the night there was a thunderstorm as there were flashes through the curtain, otherwise it was peaceful. By morning we were squeezing round the Brest peninsular between the islands and the mainland and then it was a flat crossing up to the Cherbourg peninsular and across to the Isle of Wight during the rest of the day.
We left Bilbao at 17:30 Wednesday and we are expected into Portsmouth at 20:45 tonight, Thursday.