We were heading back north today, a basic straight run from Salamanca to the picos. Originally we had planned on avoiding motorways but experience had shown that on these days where we needed to cover some distance through relatively plain countryside the non motorway routes ended up being town, speed bump, traffic lights etc on repeat. So motorway for most of the miles and then the planned route took us off once we got near the hills and we had a lovely twisty end to the day .
Before we at off, Gary wanted to swap his Tyres around as the fronts were wearing excessively . He had tried to buy some new ones but had no joy so this was the next best option.
Whist Gary was doing this, some of us walked back into Salamanca for a coffee and to buy some Iberian ham.
Tyre swap done , breakfast eaten and we all headed off for fuel then onto the motorway . This part of Spain is pretty uninteresting so we didn’t feel like we were missing out on anything.
p155 stop / lunch stop approaching we pulled off at was signed as services, only to find it was actually a mile so off the motorway and was actually just a slightly downtrodden village that had seen better days before the motorway was built to bypass it.
As it turned out lunch was good.
With a bit of shuffling around of cars when leaving the village we ended up with MarkM upfront who promptly put his foot down … now I was hanging back with Gary as he’d already mentioned his car was happy in this heat at about 3500rpm… so as it turned out it was just me and Gary crusing up the motorway until it was time to pull off ( if only some others had read the instructions
)
Off the motorway these back roads were superb fun , starting off as open sweepers …. The irony being the self imposed 3500rpm limit was completely ignored for the remainder of the day. Got to say me and Gary had some real fun.
We headed up these new to us roads which lead onto some of the roads we had travelled on the first day. You know your having fun when Gary says over the radio he’s having to drop off the pace as his brakes were starting to fade
As it turned out, not long later up in the hills, the skies darkened and we had our first proper rain of the trip.
We sat back a bit and had a steady run down to our final hotel .
Now nearly everyone had ended up split into small groups, so cars arrived at different times but with it being wet, the best option was to meet up in the bar and settle in for drinks and we decided the bar food rather than the restaurant. It was a great way to end what actually turned out to be a good day of driving.
