Beginning Our Journey Home

Today we begin our journey home. It’s spread over a few days, the first leg, today, was Tarragona to Zaragoza, tomorrow we move onto Bilbao for the night and then onto Sanatader for the ferry to Plymouth.

Today’s ride started with a repair to Sand’s helmet, the hot temperatures had melted the heavy duty double sided tape that fixed her Comms unit to the helmet the same as happened to me a few days back:

We are now a matching pair again 👍😃.

We left Tarragona in 32° and by the time we reached Zaragoza at the hotel it was 39°. The weather app showed the severe weather warning here at zaragoza. It was oppressively hot. The ride itself was through some very striking landscapes and, as we were only travelling about 62 mph we were able to appreciate the views.

On arrival at our hotel…

…this is the reason we stayed inside and had our evening meal there. I had a dip in the pool but it was too hot to sit in the shade to dry off. Thank goodness for a cool bar 😰.

Hotel Palafox, Zaragoza is a great place to stay. It’s quite palacious and elegant, the staff are friendly and efficient. We ate in the restaurant as we couldn’t face walking out in the intense heat. We both ate the beef tenderloin:

…washed down with a nice Prosecco. It was the best meal of the holiday.

Today, Sunday, we ride to Bilbao, it’s 3 hours in the saddle which means a 4 to 4.5 hour journey time with stops. This is our 1st journey wearing motorcycle jackets since Sevelle 😜. It was quite cool for us when we left it was only 21° so we even wore our summer gloves, thankfully we did as, going through the mountains, it was very very chilly. When we left Zaragoza it was in the low 20 when we arrived in Bilbao it was in the same range of temperatures, not what we have been used to 🥶😱😰.

we duly arrived at our hotel but couldn’t check in. The IT outage, a few days ago, affected our booking and they had no confirmation that we had booked the room. Fortunately, we had all of Booking.com‘s information and was able to provide that to the receptionist and he traced our booking back through the Systems, which took an hour. We are in hotel Carlton, a posh hotel in Bilbao, we were shown to the bar and grill and had a complimentary glass of wine while they sorted out our booking problem, we have ended up with an upgraded room to say thank you for our patience and apologise for our inconvenience:

The hotel is lovely:

From reviews in the local press, it is the best hotel in Bilbao with the best restaurant, so we will have our evening meal here.

…well, it may have great reviews from the local press but the beef was not cooked as we like it. We both asked for it to be medium/well but it was rare. We ate what we could but only paid for 1 as I can eat the meat a bit rare.

We ride to the ferry terminal tomorrow.