Last year, as we toured through 19 European countries Sarah and I ran a sort of unofficial competition to see who, in our opinion, were the noisiest nationality on campsites. In reality it wasn’t much of a competition, the Italians won hands down. But last night three late arriving Spanish families gave them a run for their money. They arrived at about 8pm and soon had virtually all the Northern Europeans straining their necks to look in their direction as the kids screamed, their dogs yapped non stop and the adults talked to each other as if they were standing on opposite sides of a noisy river. Worst of all, of course, is the Spanish habit of eating very late at night, so it was nearly midnight before the children went to bed and a bit of peace began reign.
It is a bit unfair to lump this behaviour on the whole Spanish nation, since most Spaniards we have come across on campsites have been pretty quiet. Italians, on the other hand, certainly still deserve to be leading our competition because we have witnessed numerous occasions where Italian couples have conversed with each other for hours on end at volumes approaching those of a jet engine!
We’ve had a long slow, but beautiful journey today from Potes to Leon. The first 30 miles or so was a consistent climb through spectacular mountain forests and pastures to a high pass, with constant views of dramatic craggy peaks. Basil’s steering wheel was whipped first one way then the other as we negotiated numerous hairpin bends and some sections of road not wide enough for two vehicles. Luckily, being Saturday, there were no lorries and in fact the road was generally very quiet.
As usual there were no places to stop to take photographs of some of the best views but we did manage to pull in a couple of times to try to capture the gorgeous scenery. The highest peaks in the Picos de Europa as particularly spectacular firstly because they are formed from very light coloured rock and so look almost while in bright sun and secondly because they are all proper mountain climbers mountains. None of them are scaleable by a normal hiker, they would all require ropes and rock climbing skill to reach the tops.
Even when we exited the Picos the scenery still remained fairly mountainous resulting in us not even being able to average 30 mph.
When we finally descended into relatively flat ground for the final section to Leon the temperature hit 27 degrees, the hottest we have had so far this trip, but the countryside still remained relatively green.
We had to take an emergency break for an hour to try to assist, at a great distance, with a family problem back home and consequently we have arrived in Leon in the late afternoon. The city aire (42.604701, -5.585155) is once again free of charge so I think we will visit the city centre when things have cooled down a bit and try some tapas in what the Rough Guide describes as one of the best places to sample tapas in Spain. When a city gives you a free night’s accommodation its seems only reasonable that we should spend something with the local merchants.