Boar

The weather was about to wobble. Only a little. Forecast temperatures would drop to the mid teens to low 20s rather than mid 30s. So we continued our slow journey north, aiming to get to the Picos mountains to the west of Santander, for the last full holiday week. We planned to take our time as after all, the journey is the holiday.

We love stopping in a small town or village to have a morning coffee. Now we are Spanish this is at about noon. These coffees don’t break the bank, as they are about €1.30, sometimes provided with a smile but often just with a grunt, at these owner operated bars. With little obvious marketing, they just get on with serving the locals and anyone else who happens to drop in.

The  village centres can be stunning. This place is off the main route and we turned here to buy bread for lunch. Google maps is used to navigate but also to search for panaderia. 

One advantage of a Landy or a VW Transporter camper over a large motorhome, is that you drive and park as normal. In the popular large motorhomes you have no chance of driving many of the smaller village streets and finding a parking place your size is certainly a challenge.

We go nearly anywhere but need to be careful with signs and trees, even at only 2.6m height.

It must be nice to live here and have weather (climate) that allows so much outside stuff. I especially like to see the retirees sitting or standing, chatting to one another in the sun or shade.

Sometimes an older guy watches the world go by, sitting alone. Billy Young used to do that, in a village near us but he was the exception rather than the rule (in more cases than one 🤣).

We picked a campsite by a river Camping Llanos de Arance where a small group of school kids were staying to kayak and ride bikes. We are very ‘off season’ so the place is almost empty, whereas the river will mean it’s very full in a few weeks.

This has great clean facilities, by which we campers mean, toilets, wash basins, showers and somewhere to wash pots, with plenty of hot water.

The whole site is ring-fenced and you might have assumed that this is for security. Well it is but it’s protection from four legged creatures!

Here’s a couple of short videos:

These creatures are a little scary as they have no manners and will root-up anything they can. You can see their activities sometimes, where the ground has been roughly dug-up. It looks like what a ‘normal’ pig does, as they also turn ground into a ploughed field but these boars are wild and go where they please - except into our campsite of course.