May 15, 2013

We anxiously watch the weather forecast this morning; there are reports from all over Spain of floods, snow on high ground, people struck by lightning and high winds.  When we look out of the window it doesn’t look too bad, lots of black clouds, but not much else.  It turns out to be a day of ‘jacket on, jacket off’ as we are cold rolling down the hills but hot climbing up them.  There are a couple of showers, but we shelter for a while and they soon pass over.  So it seems we have been lucky today, but the forecast is for bad weather to last until after the weekend, so I guess it will catch up with us at some stage.

We have decided to head for Pontevedra, but not using the coast road as planned.  We can get there using an inland route instead which is shorter.  We originally had thought we would spend a few days on the coast camping.  Since it is too cold for camping, we might as well aim southwards where we hope it will be warmer even if it is wet.  We take a road south out of Santiago which we think will be less busy that the road we came in on, but it isn’t.  For 30 kilometres we fight for road space with a continual stream of lorries and cars.  Fortunately we then turn off onto a real back road – much less busy, but also much more hilly and with a terrible road surface, which seems to be the case in Galicia.  If you want a faster, smoother ride you have to battle with traffic.

The only other issue of the day is that I have picked up a bug – the sort you normally only pick up in places like India and Egypt – which is not only inconvenient but also seems to have robbed me of sufficient energy to cope with the hilly roads.  Although we haven’t had a long day on the bikes I’m ready to stop when we reach Pontevedra.