Day 3 - Monday 5th July
We both got up at 5:45am so we had time to have our breakfast and get ready. During the night the bulb had blown in the bathroom, and so I had to have a shower in the dark which was interesting! We had a nice large breakfast and finished packing. In no time at all we were called down to our bikes.
This is a frantic and exhausting time for us bikers. First of all we had to carry all our gear back to the bikes through tight corridors and even tighter gaps between cars while wearing all our gear. Then we had to untie our bikes and repack them in a very confined space. By this time the doors had opened and the first few vehicles were moving off. We had to be quick about it because, as is usually the case, we were blocking a load of other bikers, who all seemed a lot better at this than we were and were ready to set off while I was still trying to secure my tank bag.
I didn't do too bad and much to my relief was soon off the boat and sat waiting for Daz on the other side of passport control. Daz had had a bit of a nightmare. First he lost his keys and was hunting all over for them; the biker behind him asked if he'd checked his pockets which is where they turned out to be! Then he couldn't find his passport at passport control - he was a little stressed by the time he pulled up next to me!
It was a cloudy day and the temperature was cool, but not cold - so a very nice day to be riding actually. Just out of the docks we hit very busy traffic due to road works, so we filtered our way carefully for the first few miles around Bilbao. We headed away from Bilbao on the N-240, as me and Nig had last year, this is a very nice road that twists and turns its way over a large hill.
We were really getting into the ride and came round the final corner on the summit of the hill only to be confronted by a number of army personnel with very large guns. One of the guys stepped in front of us and pulled us over. My first thought was this is a little extreme for a bit of speeding! It turned out to be a checkpoint and as soon as they saw our British plates they waved us through.
From the N-240 we joined a motorway heading to Pamplona. As we neared Pamplona the weather started to improve. The GPS proved a god-send again, navigating us around Pamplona with no problems or dramas, I think it would be a very different story without it as the route around Pamplona involves a lot of roundabouts and turnings.
Heading away from Pamplona we started heading into the brilliant roads of the Pyrenees. To be honest it doesn't get much better than this - the weather was fantastic, the roads were awesome and there was very little traffic. The only problem is getting your head around all the hairpin bends, but that is all part of the fun anyway. The hardest thing, and this was to be a recurring theme was trying not to stop all the time to take photos!
We got to the camp-site at around 12:30pm and were fully pitched up some time between 1pm and 1:30pm. We had a curry in a can with rice and a nice cup of tea for lunch, then chilled out by the tents for a while. I had a brief nap in my tent and when I woke up Daz was fast asleep in his, so I went for a walk into Ezkaroze which was a lovely little village a mile or so up the road from the camp-site. When I returned to the tents Daz was just waking up so we decided to go for a beer in the village.
We returned to the site and had a meal at the on site bar at 9pm (the earliest it served food!) and a few beers. There were loads of noisy kids I presume on a school trip stopping in the hostel accommodation on site, but they were all in bed for around 11pm. We turned in at around midnight and I slept very well!