Because I am going away again it made me look back and restart the editing from the last tour.
Over the last year everything else just seemed to take over, but I have wanted to get the rest of the videos edited for a while
The memories are priceless to me and I hope you enjoy the journey too. I will keep adding the various journeys and places over time.
I will say sorry for the sound quality though, I wish wind noise hadn’t been so bad, and that is something I am still working on.
If you remember the last chapter of the journey we were in Southern France but there was one journey where I just got no footage because of rain.
Here, we head out from Dax in the South of France, into Spain.
We are heading to Asturias and I needed to make good time, so much of the first part of the journey was big A roads and Highways.
As the video progresses you will see some fantastic scenery, and some foreboding clouds as we head higher into the mountains of Asturias.
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Anyway, we left Dax in bright sunshine and scorching temperatures, so I chose my Kevlar jeans rather than waterproof trousers.
Here you can see the tree lined roads as we left Dax to head south, but I wont subject you to the miles of Highway. I have included a few clips though, first, you can see the foothills of the Pyrenees on the left.
We were passing between the Pyrenees and the Atlantic coast.
Into Spain
As we turned west into Spain it got cooler, and more blustery.
There are a lot of viaducts over the valleys and the wind was pushing the Vstrom around a bit.
The weather ahead, where we were heading, didn’t look good.
As we got further west you could see the mountains ahead, and I knew that was where we were heading.
I kept wondering when it would hit us, but we had turned off the highway and were heading inland before it started.
We hit one shower, then it seemed to clear, but we were still climbing, and the clouds looked moody ahead of us.
The roads were gorgeous. Long sweeping bends broken up by small towns. Not the whitewashed villages of Andalucia, these looked like small industrial towns and communities.
The landscape looked more like Wales than the Spain I knew, but that was why we were here, to see a different Spain. I described it as like Wales, but Wales on steroids.
As we got higher the road was cut into the mountain as it wound its way around the smaller peaks.
Scarred rock faces lined the road.
The rain was holding off other than a few small showers and I knew we weren’t too far away so I wasn’t wasting any time and we did pass some bikes coming down from the mountains at one point.
This last bit of the journey seemed to be taking forever, What looked like a short cut inland as the crow flies was made much longer by the ever winding roads.
There were few straight sections and this was a great riding road. It wound left around one peak only to sweep right around the next, until it had almost doubled back on itself, before it went left again around the next peak.
I Knew the nearest town to where we were heading was called Las Nava, but we had to turn off before we got that far and I have learned to be wary of google’s directions, so I was trying to keep track of where we were from memory too.
When the rain did start, it came with a vengeance. It hit hard and although I knew we weren’t far away I was regretting not putting my waterproof trousers on already.
And The Rain Came
I am no stranger to rain, riding in Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Wales regularly, but this was something else.
It reminded me of a trip from Castlerigg in Cumbria down to Ingleton in the Yorkshire Dales I had done one day, but this was the worst rain I had ever ridden in.
The camera went first, then the phone which was my sat nav.
My Kevlar jeans were sodden and I had made the mistake of putting the bottoms inside my boots as we had left a sunny hot France.
We had both made a point of what the place we had booked looked like, but seeing anything was just getting harder and harder.
I don’t even remember going through the roofed section of road you see I was concentrating so hard on just seeing the road.
We saw the sign we needed and finally turned off the main road onto the final run in. it immediately got steep, and the road surface was now a sludgy mixture of rain, mud and cow dung being washed off the steeply sloped fields.
Unfortunately you dont see any of that because the camera had given up, but you will see the roads in the next video.
We got to the first hairpin and had cows both sides of the road, watching, as if to say who the hell are you? This was their territory.
A narrow track dropped off to the left, but it just looked like the entrance to a field, so I carried on, through the water which was now running in torrents down the road.
I saw an open shed with a house and decided to just pull in. All we could do was laugh, but we still weren’t there.
My Spanish is terrible, but I knocked on the door and an old man opened it smiling. He spoke no English, so in broken Spanish with help from google translate on Emily’s phone we tried to get the final directions.
Back down we went, through the torrents and mud. Past the track that was now on the right, down to the next house, but no. Again, after a similar broken conversation and a telephone call we were redirected back to the small lane that dropped off the side of the road.
We climbed back on, both now thoroughly drenched to our core.
I got to the track and rolled my front wheel just over the edge so I could see better and after the short but steep drop there was a sharp bend left with dry stone walls either side of the lane.
This, I thought, is why the Mitas E07 Dakars were the right tyres for the trip. Most road tyres and even 50/50 ADV tyres would have been useless at this point.
Over I went, feathering the throttle hoping there were no nasty surprised under the puddles and mud.
A colourful little Spanish lady with an umbrella waved at us from further up the lane. We had arrived, sort of.
Riding up we had to pass the cottage we had rented, but got a wonderful parking space under a huge old evergreen that dominated the whole area.
We just got everything off the bike as quickly as possible, and once in, all the gear we had on was hung around radiators and on curtain rails.
When I took off my boots I had to admit the O’neil Sierra’s were well and truly 100% waterproof. Both were full to the brim where the rain had run down my jeans inside them.
I poured the water out of the door into the drain and went back to find something to pack them with. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Time To Rest
Tired and hungry after a long day, we cooked as quickly as possible and snuggled down for the night hoping everything would dry out and the weather was better in the morning.
In the next video I will show you around the area better. The footage is all from the area around Las Nava, in the heart of Asturias.
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