Picos de Europa

It’s time for more mountains!

When we told Mercedes that we were planning to joruney around the north of Spain for a few days she strongly recommended heading to Picos de Europa.

And, as I may have already made clear in the context of the tapas, when Mercedes recommends something, you do as the woman says!

By the time we had managed to weave through the mountains from Fuente De, we were pretty exhausted. Especially our driver. I mean, to be honest, I spent most of the time with my feet on the dashboard (I know, I know), giggling insanely at some weird radio drama which involved a man saying both sexily and dramatically:

‘Por que si?…

… Por que NO?!’.

From this point Por que si/por que no became a bit of a theme fo our trip. And then when we saw a sign in a shop saying ‘Perros no’ (no dogs), we started saying ‘Perros si?’ ‘Perros NO!’. And laughing maniacally.

That’s a small glimpse into our relationship for you. We are broken forever by eachother.

Anyway, because of said driving, and it being generally late by the time we arrived in our small town of Cain, we pretty much shovelled food into our mouths and went to bed. As an aside, in case you ever travel in the area, Google’s estimates only work if you travel at speed limit.

Which you will not be able to do on those tiny, winding, terrifying roads.

Unless you are my mother.

In any case, we were tired. We slept. And woke up late to this:

BAM!

Mountains!

Our plan for the day was pretty simple. Walk through the mountains in the Southwards direction. When tired or bored- turn around and walk back.

And so we began.

And immediately stopped.

Andy, for reasons that I do not understand, chose to stop 1 minute into our walk to buy himself some sort of stick thing. Which he then carried around the country before eventually ‘forgetting’ in a hotel in Santander.

Still, the stick-salesman also had kittens. So I was pretty ok with the brief pause.

In case you’re wondering what walking in the mountains is like well.. it’s pretty easy. In this case! Because it’s less of a ‘mountain hike’ and more of a ‘stroll down a path cut into the mountain’. You can see part of the path in the photo above. Anyway, it’s suitable for people of all ages, with all number of lungs (probably not 0 lungs). There were even people running the path

And so we walked…

You might be able to tell from the photos that the weather was quite variable. There was rain, there was sun. But thankfully it was never too hot or too cold to make things truly miserable.

Spain is pretty perfect like that.

(Actually maybe ‘the north of spain’… Madrid was hot like satan’s armpits).

GOATS! Lookout ANDY!!!!

I’m going to be honest. From here on out it’s mostly pictures of beautiful mountain landscapes, with a lot of selfies thrown in.

So here are some rare words from Andy about the experience to break things up a bit:

We rented a car drove from Valladolid up to mountains. It was my first time driving in Europe since we first got here and I’m happy to say that I didn’t run over any cyclists or hitch hikers. There were a few narrow roads in the mountains where only one car could pass at a time but fortunately everything went well.

Ruta del Cares was beautiful and an easy hike, the route cuts high up through a valley so the view is pretty varied. We saw lots of goats and could smell them too. And eat their cheese.

At one point it began to rain to the point where we choose to seek cover.

Our cover, like all of its kind in the area, smelled very strongly of Goat. Guys! This is the point. You can go on past this point, but you will just go downhill for a very long way, and then you will have to turn back and go uphill for a very long way.

Mercedes told us this before we left.

We chose to ignore Mercedes.

That was the wrong thing to do.

(Check out the path winding into the distance!)

^This was the camera balancing act that I was most proud of. I managed to slip one of the gorilla arms into a small hole in the rock face, and used the other arms to kind of brace the camera. Sure, the photo cut off most of me- a fact that I only discovered once I had removed the camera from it’s precarious position- but Andy look pretty friggin’ dashing.