13th October (sunny and hot) 15 km on foot, 130km by car

Woke at 7am after a lovely sleep and dozed for a bit before Julia jumped in the beautiful shower. Funny isn’t it to be describing a shower as beautiful, but when you go from camp showers to lovely tiled, perfectly decorated bathrooms, you want to make note of it. After I’d showered we packed up our possessions, took them to the car and went into the bar for breakfast, which was simple, but very nice. They could have charged anything, especially the time that we turned up, with nothing available, but they charged 75 Euros, including breakfast.

The view from our window this morning

Oseja village church

Took shots of our resting place and village and drove the very winding, narrow road through to Cain, the starting place for our gorge walk. Took a little longer than we thought as every hundred metres we were oohing and aahhing and stopping to take shots. 

Pete in the rental car - enjoying the ride much more this morning

These were the kinds of views we were getting just on the drive to the Ruta del Cares walk.

Shall we have this picnic table for our morning coffee?

Or perhaps this one?  Oh decisions, decisions!

The village of Posada de Valdeon which was absolutley humming with trampers when we drove through.

You might think this is the track, but this is the road.  It wasn't all like this, only about 10km

Finally at Cain and the start of the Ruta del Cares

We paid 3 Euros to an older guy to park in his field in Cain and what a bargain. The human traffic was tremendous. People were everywhere. Those in hiking gear, people with dogs, adults with kids…of all ages, four to thirteen. Older folk, runners…it was mayhem.

Now….you all know me….I am not criticising….but…what the hell is anyone doing taking a dog, from a Dachshund to a husky, on a gorge trek through the mountains, on very rocky terrain. What about their pads people….However, these must be the same idiots who take four year old kids on a twenty kilometre hike, where there are no guardrails at any point, and the children, with a misplaced foot, could plummet, five hundred feet into the cold river below. It was scary walking on the outside when passing people. Some of those with dogs had them on those extendable leads….are you kidding me..? Talk about an horrific accident waiting to happen. Finally, you’ve got those prats who want to walk two abreast on a single track, which is trying to cater for two lanes anyway, who march past, not thinking that a heavy nudge would see Enrique or Maria Consuela, doing a bungy over the gorge, without the required attachments.

Finally ready to start at 11am

Wow that water looked tempting!

Pete wishing they walked on the left over here

The aquaduct which is your constant companion - I assume it's the reason the track was built.
Perhaps one of our researchers could find this out for us as all the signs were in Spanish -
strange that!

Finished and would have been happy to jump in that river behind us only it was just in front of a dam and didn't have togs.

So we had to settle for a foot soak.....and that water was icy!

The scenery was beyond belief and I’m sure some of the photos will not do it the justice it deserves. Massive mountains of rock rising up from the valley below and around every bend, a different photographic opportunity. I’m surprised that we made the distance that we did, with all the stopping we did. After a bite to eat, we decided to return to Cain, with even more photo ops. Bathed our feet in the freezing waters at the end of the hike, which was heaven, for a minute, before you couldn’t feel your feet anymore. Sat in the shade (and we had to pick our spot carefully to avoid all the dog poop) drinking a couple of cokes from a little store run by the guy who charged us for parking, rather than the bigger restaurants/cafes that were humming.  With all these tourists, there was not one public toilet, so this place is going to get pretty mucky, very quickly.  Must say that the majority of walkers we heard, were Spanish, with only the odd few from Germany. No one else spoke English. Although this would be counted as a serious tourist attraction, most tourists on holiday probably wouldn’t bother travelling this far into the mountains to walk. Managed the drive out, with only minimal encounters with other vehicles, which was a blessing, because trying to negotiate a passing manoeuvre on these roads is dicing with death.

Just took this photo through the car windscreen

We thought that the walk would be the end of the gob smacking scenery, but now we had the autumn colours, the trees, the lakes and the rock to contend with. As Julia stated as we drove along, she thought it was the most scenic day of her life……which is amazing really since she has me to look at every day.

We hired the car to get to Vigo and avoid the mountain passes by bike, so that we could get back on track. As Ju said, a lot of the mountain roads went through the valleys, but, you had to climb those initial mountains to get to that point. It was definitely worthwhile hiring the car and rather than take the train from Seville, which was our original intention to get to our end point of Barcelona, we may well do the same again. If we had taken the train from Bilbao to Vigo, we would have missed so much. In the middle of nowhere, we had booked as we travelled, a hotel for the night. The La Alegria was out in the wops and we booked it online. It was a three storey, basic, but very clean and tidy, hotel/bar/restaurant. We have no view, but I’m hopeful that we will have a peaceful night’s sleep, once again. After being shown our room, we opened the window as it was a bit stuffy and adjourned to the bar, where we indulged in wines, beers and coffees and hopefully, if we are not too pissed, food….which apparently is served between 9.15pm and 11pm.  About 8pm Ju was getting cold, so went upstairs to get her trackpants on.  Leaving the window open had been a huge mistake as the room was full of hundreds of flies.  We had noticed a silage smell when we pulled up to the hotel but once inside, had forgotten about it.  It must have been this that had attracted all the flies. It was real horror movie stuff – there was no way we could kill them all so we managed to convey to the waitress through google translate that we had mozcas in our habitacion and got a new room.  At least it was a distraction from the hunger pangs.  Now all I have to do is keep Julia awake. After thirty odd years, there are only so many party tricks that I have at my disposal.

The rest of today's photos, we will put on tomorrow's blog as we think you've seen enough for one day faithful readers.

Well, we ended up spending four hours in the bar, blogging, doing photos and waiting for the restaurant to open and finally eating at 10pm. It was fish soup…ok….meat of some sort with supposedly chips…yeah right..!! and a cold custard type dessert, which wasn’t too bad. It’s a budget hotel and that’s what we got. The beds were comfortable enough, but because they are on a tiled floor, the wood moves on them and makes a noise. The walls are literally paper thin and we can hear the coughing and spluttering of the bunch of workmen they have staying here. Let’s see how the night rolls on.