I had left my hat behind, which is why I was tramping the streets of Gijon in northern Spain, looking for a replacement. None was to be had: the Spanish don’t seem to go in for them much, so unless I wanted to look like a friend of Mr Ed, the talking horse, in a fetching little number with flowers or a distant relative of Tintin in a jaunty beret, I was going to have to make do with my old beanie for the time being.
We’d left England in a bit of a rush, as Lottie the Land Rover needed a few minor repairs while still under warranty and we only got her back less than 24 hours before departure. At this point, the weather changed from being dry and warmish to cold, windy and sleety. We had a real struggle to prepare everything, hence the missing hat….
Once on board the ferry, I discovered I’d left half my toiletries back in Lottie, so ended up combing my newly washed hair with a plastic fork….I baulked at paying £10 for a deodorant, so Alan and I decided to smell together companionably for the next 24 hours, sharing his toothbrush….
We chugged across the Bay of Biscay, celebrating Alan’s birthday with a delicious meal and slept fairly well, despite the high seas for the first few hours. It was good to have an outside cabin: although you can only see the sea, at least it moves!
Primed with the satnav, we rolled off the boat in Santander. It was dark, wet, windy and cold. Our camperstop was about half an hour away, easy peasy………except that our sat nav didn’t know about a new autoroute extension and we found ourselves careering around in a grey fog on the satnav screen, charging down an unknown road with no visible exit. What fun. Of course we got there but it was not what we needed when we’d just arrived…..
The site was delightful, by a lake on the edge of a wildlife park and we had a chilly walk next day, observing a solitary elephant having a lonely wee in a distant corner of its enclosure, together with some springboks and buffalo. We wandered into the small village and bought some local cheese and anchovies, then hurried back to warm up.
We headed off next day and yes, you’ve guessed it we found ourselves going up into the mountains, up and up and round and round. How do we manage it? The cliffs were made of such a hard stone they looked like slices of concrete, no need here for the chicken wire like hair nets that they had in Italy to retain the falling rubble.
So on to Gijon, an attractive city on the coast in Asturias (which I thought was something you put in cocktails or somewhere you can be a prince of perhaps? but never mind, I digress). It’s a proper working Spanish city, not a manicured tourist town. It’s full of parks with palm trees and it has the most beautiful enormous, long sandy beach.

Alas, it doesn’t have any hats but it does have many, many places to eat, so we found ourselves a Menu del Día (remember those ¿) for €7.50. We ate handsomely and I was brought a bottle of red wine, though I only wanted a glass, Alan had beer, we had coffee. Final bill? “€15, no the wine is included, please take the remainder of the bottle with you” ……why would you bother to cook with food at that price?!
Onwards to the west, with Portugal beckoning to the south. Spain was hit by a band of icy, cold weather and the south was suffering with heavy snowfalls on the Costa Blanca. We were getting off lightly in the north but it certainly didn’t seem that way as we struggled to open and shut the door in a Force 8 gale in a small harbour town, San Ciprian.

Each time I went to get something out of Lottie, I felt like Captain Oates bidding farewell to Scott, as I ventured into the dark and stormy night. But back I came with the bottle of wine, all’s well…..the wind howled all night long, so I stuffed in my ear plugs and also blanked out the barking dogs. Yes, it seems that to be a true Spaniard, you have to have a dog, often chained up outside, which barks as anyone goes past and all night long…….
Tired of the wind but invigorated by a small market (hooray!) we decided to head inland to…..the hills. It was fun and games at the service point, where Alan soaked himself with the hose, then dropped the lavatory cassette lid down the soil pipe (yuk!) and then squirted me with water too……ah the joys of camper life!
We spent a peaceful, though colder night in the little town of Ourol up a pretty valley. Then on, still westwards, into Galicia, which we have really fallen in love with. It has Celtic ties to Wales, Ireland, Brittany and so on and of course its own language, so they throw in ‘o’s and ‘x’s and it begins to resemble Portuguese.

The coastline is similar to Cornwall, so it looks as if the two areas have been pulled apart. There are towns on beautiful wide estuaries, similar to Dartmouth but Galicia also has massive hills and thick forests.

What is so impressive about it, is the fact that it remains so unspoiled, with beautiful sandy beaches but no development, as yet……

So after two pleasant nights at the beach at Cabo Prior, (who was Prior? I want to know), watching surfers and fishermen, with a beautiful starry night sky and the weather improving by the day, we turned south to La Coruña or A Coruña as it’s known in Galician. It’s a large city on the north west coast, famous for its football team……among other things. Let’s see! I’ll report back in my next episode.