On our way!

---

Hola Peeps!

Well we´re on our way! We got off to an adventurous start as we took the scenic route to Plymouth, later discovering the Sat Nav was set to avoid Autobahns, the up side was is was a gorgeous day and this route took us through the Cotswolds along the Fosse way (Bonus!) we rejoined the motorway near Bristol and made it to the ferry in good time. Ferry crossing was fine.

We landed around lunchtime in San Tander and thank god for Sat Nav here! The streets were pretty manic and I wouldn´t like to navigate round here whilst just getting used to RH riding... but we coped and headed straight off for San Sebastian did a quick whizz round to tourist info before finding the one campsite a few km out of town, ...When I say finding it - we managed to miss the "great big sign" on the first pass and when I saw it on the next one I immediately stopped in suprise, Stuart however only manged to stop with the help of my pannier and promtly fell off! (Note to our mums - it was a very quiet road, we were doing less than 5 MPH and stuarts fine ... I have a little jaw ache from laughing tho!)

San Sebastian is nice, two hills (Monte igeldo and monte urgull) stand at either end of the long sandy beach, we´re only camped a couple of km from Monte igeldo so walked to this from our campsite, there´s a tired looking "amusement park" here and a funicular down to the beech, we got this and walked across to the other end touching both walls at either end of the beach (we were told we had to do this!) A great big statue of Jesus is on the top of monte urgull so we popped into town for some go-faster pasta before the uphill journey to say hi! (I thought it was nice that Jesus is sort of watching over us on the first part of our trip - stu thought this was a stupid idea and decided to take the Saint Micheal so to speak!!!)

Yesterday we were up at 03.30 am (we´d planned for 4.30 but nature called) to make the day trip over to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls as part of the St Fermin festival. The journey over was pretty spooky as it was a full moon and you could see the mist over the hill tops (Stu was thinking like something out of a Arthur conan Doyle story, I was thinking a really scary episode of Scooby Do). We arrived just as the sun was rising and tried to get our bearings around the town. The festival lasts for a week and something the guide books don´t mention is the smell of stale urine + beer and broken glass everywhere from the partying the night before. The town itself was great and we thought we found a great spot to view from until we were moved on by the police (dooh!) I still manged to see some of it from our next spot but we may go back and try again when set off in that direction.

We´ve just checked the layout and it´s a bit wobbly - but it´s a nice sunny day here so I don´t want to sit in an internet cafe all day! So please excuse all stange bits and grammer/spelling mistakes etc etc (this is the way of thing to come...) We´re off into the Pyrinees tomorrow so to be continued....

---