Journey’s End for the Road Book

But not for us, yet. We still have the ferry crossing and over 600 miles of the UK to traverse before we’re home, which we had hoped would be sometime  on Friday. Once again, though, the Plan has had to be changed as the “steering wobble” that we mentioned a few days ago has got worse and needs some attention before we go much further.

We finished the “original” Road Book route on Sunday in Carcastillo…

After a long day of pretty varied scenery which began with us leaning heavily on the bell push on the wall outside recepcion, attempting to summon El Gerente – the manager. We’d warned him the previous afternoon, when we’d eventually found him, of our departure time. In fact, he’d found us as we wandered about the site looking for somewhere to park and, with a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp, he didn’t look best pleased at being disturbed. However, after a very windy night under the pine trees we just wanted to get away, so shoved the fee under the door, making sure it was witnessed by a passing resident.

We retraced our steps to Luna and picked up the route again. The scenery today is very different to previous sections of the route, which had been densely wooded, steep – sometimes vertical on both sides, up and down – and recently very muddy. In fact Elly now looks more like a large yellow pig that’s just spent a happy hour wallowing in deep and sticky ooze. Not much yellow visible below her waist.

The tracks on Monday were generally on the flat. Though still rough in places they were straight enough for us to get up some speed and it was quite exhilarating, not to say challenging, to drive it like a rally stage at speeds that required some fast fingerwork with the pages. For a change we could see the road ahead making its way to the horizon without much in the way.

Sue coped well with the navigation but we did have one glitch which wasn’t her fault. The route had changed slightly since a new bridge over a railway had replaced the one in the book – or so we believe. Anyway, we made a “left or right” decision which turned out to be the wrong choice and spent a while exploring old railway workings, canals and decrepit bridges until finally admitting defeat and going back to Square One and trying the other way, which was, of course, obvious within metres once we’d started.

The morning gave us some items of interest to explore. Passing between the pillars of a Roman aqueduct we tried to workout where the water was coming from or going to, but the whole edifice seemed to be almost a monument, with no obvious purpose.

We spotted the castle of King Sancho 7^th and stopped for a look around. This is a first class example of an original “Crusader Castle” of which I had a plastic toy when a small boy. This one lacked a drawbridge and portcullis but had an equally effective guardian in the form of a local historian who was giving a guided tour and quite clearly wasn’t going to let anyone in to mess it up. We gawped from outside, instead.

There were churches everywhere, some abandoned, others less so.

We passed below a score of small villages, all clinging with more or less success to the sides of the hills and with no visible means of support – architectural or economic.

What, we wondered, do people do up here for a living? There seemed to be little in the way of “passing trade” and we’ve seen very few people about anyway, let alone vehicles. While we discussed this we were back on tarmac and approaching a junction. Traffic coming from the left, our 7 0’clock and coming steeply downhill was meant to stop – I saw the sign as we approached, at speed, on the main road. I also saw a modern Peugeot estate car coming down the hill and, if he didn’t stop at the junction would smack into us like a galleon’s broadside. Now, sometimes you get a bit of a sixth sense about things, and here was one of those times. 2If he doesn’t stop”, I thought” he’ll hit us”. I began to slow down so that, at current rates of closure, he’d join the road as if from a slip road, about 10 feet ahead…Clearly he was unaccustomed to checking or giving way, and he came on to the main road as predicted, just ahead. At that moment he must’ve caught a glimpse of us in his mirror because with a violent swerve he went off the road to the left….Scattering stones, he came to a dust-enveloped stop. We didn’t. I checked behind and he was shaken, stirred and perhaps a little more awake.

Lunchtime brought us to the Bardenas Reales , an area of largely flat vistas with some fantastic rock architecture poking out of it. Flat-topped mesas, sandy pyramids and piles of boulders that, without some scale, could be pebbles.

We thought the whole place resembled the set of an old black-and-white Western movie, with cowboys camped in the ruined stone huts and Apaches lined up on every ridge. It's difficult to convey any sense of scale in a photo, but the pyramid in the shot on the left is about 100 feet high at a (very) rough guess. I'm sure someone will put me right on that eventually.


We stopped for lunch in the shelter of one of those abandoned farms as the wind was still blowing a hooligan. Despite the shelter we still had some dusty seasoning added to our sandwiches and the reason for the weird erosion of the rock was more obvious.

We decided to end the day a little earlier than usual as we posed by the finish line at Carcastillo. We had time to do the route’s extension to St Jean Pied de Port and we really wanted to do this as it gives a more satisfying finish. We’d be climbing back up into the mountains again to cross the border back into France, and this would be a great conclusion to a great trip, we thought. We found a pleasant campsite – out of the wind – at Lumbier, sharing the site with some Swiss and German bikers. At least one of them is the Snoring Champion of the EU (not the Swiss) although he was outdone some of the time by a cacophony of canines that must’ve just been imported from Morocco as they’d learned to bark all night without more than a minute or two to draw breath. At 0700 the peacock decided to add his voice to the choir and we got up and were clear of the site just over an hour later. The promised bread was nowhere to be seen and neither was the site manager, so we decided to press on while the weather was still good. There were clouds on the northern horizon where we were heading and we didn’t want to be caught in rain on those tracks if we could avoid it.

Up into the hills again and mostly on good tarmac, if a little patchy in places. The local dialect was now definitely something very different with lots of “K”s and “Z”s in the village names reminiscent of Greek, not Spanish. The general feel of the landscape was different, too. More like open woodland with plenty of grassy meadows that’d be ideal wild camping spots if you thought you could get away with it. Plenty of herds of well groomed horses seemed to be wandering freely which probably explains the neat look to the grass. We were held up for a few minutes by a herd of cows being brought in for milking but generally didn’t see anyone else until we were almost at the Col d’Orgambide and the border – shrouded in mist as the clouds rolled over us.

It was a moment to enjoy though, despite the temperature. A foot in both countries like we’d done 9 days before.

Once we’d lost a little height the view of the French side was of green rolling hills as we made the descent to St Jean Pied de Port (“at the foot of the pass”). It was in this area that the evasion lines of WW2 operated, escorting Allied servicemen and agents from Occupied France to Spain – where they were promptly locked up. The terrain must’ve presented quite a challenge to undernourished, poorly clothed and perhaps injured people desperate to escape, and without the benefit of 4 wheel drive, either.

We finished as we’d started – in the Lidl carpark.

We’d wanted to spend some time sightseeing in the town but as it was market day the place was packed and with nowhere to park remotely close to the “action” we decided to press on and find a campsite on the coast…where the true End of the Route ceremony had to take place….

Both feet in the Atlantic, and a Sea-to-Sea crossing of the Pyrenees completed.

Just got to get home, now. We’ve declared a Day Off today, Tuesday, in our camp at St Jean de Luz where Mike’s tried to sort out the steering problem and Sue has organised the BBQ dinner for tonight, by which I mean she’s allocated tasks:

The former event hasn’t improved things much so we’ve booked Elly into a garage in Plymouth on Friday. We know what’s wrong but Mike a. hasn’t got the part we need and b. doesn’t want to try tightening anything else in case it shears off, leaving us in a worse position than we’re in right now. At least she’s driveable as long as we keep the speed down below “shimmy-critical” and once we’re off the ferry we have 2 days flex in the onward plan to absorb the delay.

So, that’s about all for this trip. There might be more drama to add about the last leg of the journey as the forecast isn’t great and neither is Sue’s stomach on a rolling sea. I guess the next instalment, barring shipwreck, will be the After Action Report, once we’ve absorbed all the lessons and re-designed half the truck. Just like last time. Plus ca change…..