Category: La Manga 2015/16

Journey from Bilbao to La Manga – Day 2.

IMG_0764Well, it may not be the best campsite we’ve stayed on, but we had a good night’s sleep and woke up to a brilliant crescent moon pointing out to a well illuminated Venus. Although the water had been cold everywhere else, the showers were excellent, so a good start to the day.

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More excellent motorway, a little busy as we skirted Madrid but otherwise very easy driving. We had arranged to pick up the hire car at 3:00 so we hoped there would be no delays – and there weren’t. We arrived at Murcia Airport to collect our car, a white Fiat 500 at 2:20, perfect. image

Lesley followed me as I had Sat. Nav., bad move, I went wrong at the first roundabout. A small problem counting to 4 for the fourth exit. Apart from that we made good progress and were on the campsite about half an hour later.

We were saying hello to friends before we even got to our pitch, and lots of our friends, who knew we were arriving came to say a quick hello. It was good to be back.

Journey from Bilbao to La Manga – Day 1, the sunflower trail.

IMG_0752Ferry arrived on time and we didn’t have to wait too long before we disembarked. This is our third time of doing this and with Lesley in charge of navigation we made short work of any potential sidetracks and headed on our way towards our overnight stop at Camping Pico de la Miel.

IMG_0744All together we drove 211 miles, an easy drive helped by the fact that the weather was excellent the roads superb and the traffic very light. The first part of the journey is through very green  and luscious landscapes, undulating and very pretty. Further on and there is a definite change to the landscape, it is now much more open country side, the trees disappear and there are huge areas of agricultural farmland, a prominent crop seems to be sunflowers. At this time of year they appear to be dead and I assume they are waiting to be harvested for their seeds. IMG_0730The hills when you get to them are big, at times we are in excess of 1500m.

Apart for stops for lunch and fuel we drove straight through arriving at Camping Pico de la Miel at about 6:00pm.IMG_0732IMG_0746 IMG_0731

Ferry: Portsmouth to Bilbao

imageAfter a good trip to Portsmouth we queued up (in first place) ready to go through check in in the morning. 4G signal at the dock (in fact most of the way to Portsmouth) meant that we had pretty good internet access so were able to access emails, our blog and social media. The ferry, “Cap Finistere” was the same one we have travelled on before and it’s okay, nothing fancy but nothing missing either. Wifi is free but not very fast. It’s still impressive when you think we are moving and must be locked onto a satellite to get it.

There is a small cinema on board showing a selection of films throughout the journey. We opted to watch “Tha Man from Uncle”, it was absolute rubbish, but on the plus side the seats were very comfortable and we had a good view of the screen.

We had dinner in the restaurant and the food was very good, I can’t remember the names of the dishes Lesley had scallops followed by Sole for the main course and I had serrano ham and a poached egg followed by a sumptious pork dish. Unfortunately as it was now dark and the boat was rocking a bit I started to feel a little off. Lesley had taken some sea sickness tablets and was feeling fine. We decided to watch a bit of telly as a distraction but at 9:00 decided it would be a good idea to go to bed. I felt better lying down and slept quite well. The restaurant’s Petit Dejéuner was basically the full English, it was very nice and should set us up for the day. No delays so far and the sun looks like it could be there for us as we arrive.

La Manga here we come

imageWe left home about 11:30 in beautiful  weather with blue skies and bright sunshine. We were in no rush so we took our time. It was just as well as the weather conditions became very mixed and traffic quite busy. We found a good services to stop at at Tothill in Newbury where we had tea and watched telly for a while. The final final leg of our journey took about an hour and we arrived just-in-time to queue up ready for tomorrow. We actually managed to be first in the queue.

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Portman to La Unión

IMG_6940Lesley suggested a bike ride today so we set off for Portman. Mostly main roads passing the renowned and exclusive golf club “La Manga”. Into Portman is a long uphill trek which at its’ peak has panoramic views of the surrounding countryside and the start of the steep descent into Portman. The countryside here is not pretty, many years of quarrying has left many scars as the minerals have been mined from the ground; it has also left Portman beach contaminated from the effects of this industry. As ever, from the destruction of the hillside, the creation of challenging and prolific off road cycle challenges have been born.

We were at sea level and whatever we did we had a big ride up. After some thought and discussion Lesley convinced me that we should explore the off road track. There was a map at the start showing a 6 – 7 km route to La Unión. It looked steep but then so did all the alternatives.

IMG_6944It wasn’t long before we realised the true nature of the challenges that lie ahead of us. Not only was it technically challenging from a riding point of view, but there were many choices of route, no more maps and someone thought it was funny to destroy the few finger posts there were. The only option was to rely on our vague sense of direction. Fortunately we didn’t make too many errors but it was certainly more challenging than we expected.

There weren’t many people on route but near the summit we did meet a couple who didn’t understand our Spanish and asked if we spoke English. They were from Sweden and spent about 5 months a year here but they were uncertain which was the route to take to La Unión.

IMG_6958Dropping off the top we soon hit a concrete road and, brilliantly, a small coffee shop. The Spanish definitely know how to make a café con leche. The reason for the road was that the old quarry buildings and mines had been converted into a mining museum. They joined all the points of interest with a road train which we saw full of school children.IMG_6965

 

 

 

IMG_6973Into La Uniónand we caught the train to Los Niétos, €2.70 for the two of us. We had a final stop for lunch at Mar de Crystal before finishing the ride home.

The Strava app kept turning itself off, but I’m guessing the cycling was somewhere around 25km and over 500m of climb.