Our Spanish / Portugal 2025 roadtrip

[hot66]

Always unsure on whether to post up our annual roadtrip, but everyone’s seems to enjoy the story, so here is our 2025 trip. We have returned now to the UK so this was in the past week or so .

After last years trip to the Pyrenees , we decided how much we enjoyed driving in Spain. There was just something about the mixture of great tarmac, great weather and light traffic.

So for the 2025, I started planning a road trip based around northern Spain & dropping into Portugal then up the Duoro and onto centralist Spain before heading back up again. As usual planned for May time which hopefully gets the weather but just before the tourists .

Usual problem this time of the year is finding hotels as a lot dont open until June … which means stitching routes together based around what hotels are available . Not as easy as it sounds as also I tend to keep each day to around 5-6 hours driving which is around 200 miles.



So here we are

Day 1

First day of the trip , and a slog for me as we were all meeting at a Pub just north of Portsmouth at 3pm, and then continuing on together to catch the Portsmouth - Bilbao ferry.

My home for the next 10 days




All cars arrived safely looking shiny and clean. A good mix with a ’72, ’73’ , 78, 88 then 2 964’s and a 993. Been a while since we’d seen each other and nice to see the cars lined up again ready for adventure.

So onto Portsmouth via a fuel stop to brim the cars.


Now lining up for the ferry should be straight forward especially when you arrive early and get near the front of the ques, until Mark in his 964 decides to jump across from his lane into ours thus getting our line black flagged with a green cone put in front .. and from then we watched the rest of the boat get loaded ahead of us… guess who was buying the beers that night !




Eventually onto the boat and into the ‘old peoples’ lounge .. otherwise known as commodores class which is £80 or so extra and you get a large private lounge with food and drink on tap all day, well worth paying for if you do this trip . So with holiday excitement the beers and wine started flowing knowing ahead of us was a full day and another night on the boat.

[hot66]

DAY2

Of course what do I wake up to after the night before … a stinking hangover Lucky not much to do as no phone reception and wasn’t paying for the crap wifi , so 24hours of just chatting with you mates about everything and nothing. It’s days like this you don’t get to experience much anymore.

We were lucky enough to see the dolphins again though

[hot66]

DAY3

The one thing that seem to take everyone ages to compute, was what time should be get up this morning… was the boat working on UK times or Spanish .. well it turned out arrival in Spain was 8am ( uk time ) so we were all up and surprisingly raring to go .




The thing about Bilbao, within 15 mins your out onto some great driving roads heading up into the green mountains. That’s the thing bout this part of Spain, it is so green and lush. It’s a wonderful area.






Today’s route was a twisty one heading south and east with the ultimate destination our first hotel in the Picos.

Everyone had been given the route plots in advance and also Richard had used these with AI to create a Waze plots document too .. Waze being our choice of sat nav as it highlights police locations and cameras. I tend to save the plots as favorites with their plot number and date as a title so I can enter the next plot easily as I reach the current.

Anyway, off we headed into the hills, taking it steady to start with as needed to ge our eye in and also with it being a Saturday there seemed to be hundred’s of cyclist choosing the same roads as us . An hour or so in though and the roads became clearer of people and more rural.

A common occurrence on this trip at our age, wasthe regular p155 stop, which generally were pretty scenic. Apart from food stops, the p155 stops were really the only times we stopped and took photos .










So … onwards and the roads were always great. It was only day 1 and I’d promised the lads a ‘death road’ … which usually entails narrow with no barriers and very steep drop off …although death road one had recently had barriers installed ! Didn’t ruin the fun or the views .








It took us about 5 hours and we eventually reached Potes where we stopped for a late lunch ( which was fab as most Spanish food is ) before heading up the climb to out first Paradore which was in a spectacular setting .


Potes


Our hotel

[Gary71]

Just to add a few from my side,




As planned Raymond gets the blue stairs and I get the green


Sladey died briefly for some reason…



Chilling in the mountains


First of many of these!

Artistic group selfie

And of course some amazing roads

[jb]

It looks fabulous
Thanks for posting

[yoda]

Looks like a fabulous trip and you had the weather. Thanks for posting up the details.

[markm]

James, you failed to mention that in getting green coned on getting on the ferry, that actually meant I was first off for our group, me genius

[markm]

Couple of photos off me for day one p155 stop view




First nights accommodation in Potes



Must say big thumbs up to james, in his quest to find accommodation this year on the trip, he spoilt us. We stopped in some really spectacular hotels through out the trip


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Bootsy]

Artistic group selfie

Name the boy band....

Take (a) Shat

Boys 2 (old) Men

etc. etc.

[Bootsy]

How’s the new RS behaving Mark?

[anglophone1]

good stuff guys

[markm]

How’s the new RS behaving Mark?

Excellent thank you Bootsy. Was a bit heavy on the arms for the steering as it lacks power steering, but performed very well indeed and I am quite surprised as to ho much I enjoyed driving a Left hooker abroad.

[TimB]

James

Great that you post these road trips and always some useful tips to pick up......we are planning something similar for September or October so particularly helpful this year!

[murph2309]

A couple from me - such an amazing trip…

[murph2309]