Santander to Salamanca Once off the ferry, we set the GPS to Salamanca, hoping to get as far as was possible in the remaining afternoon of the day. This time in Spain is only to be a short interval, the main aim being to get to the Med coast and Algeceris by Monday. We drove past the Picos de Europa, high mountains with a healthy capping of snow still present. The wind certainly still has its icy touch to be felt. Onward through valleys green with crops ...

Haro to Bilbao A drive through the Basque countryside seemed different from the rest of Spain. Here the villages are scattered through small valleys. The hilly country is heavily wooded and the fields lush and overgrown. As usual we took back roads with the GPS taking us down some alarmingly small dirt tracks. Entering Bilbao is a brilliant sight. As you come over the hills, the city is spread out below along the estuary filled with shipping stretchin...

From Vila Nova de Foz Côa to Haro - back into Spain: Our time on this trip is now rapidly drawing to a close and so it's back into Spain for the last hop across the north to Bilbao to catch the ferry to Portsmouth. We climbed through mountain ranges and Natural Parks, sometimes over 1000m high. In the distance the tops were brushed with snow but we didn't climb high enough to drive through it. But the trees are in glorious autumn colour: yellow chestnu...

Leaving Spain...and entering Portugal. Time to head west and into new territory - Portugal. The dry countryside to the border is fairly sparsely populated with few villages or towns and with much larger farms than we had seen to date. The roads had few cars and even on the smaller roads it was easy driving. In the distance not far from a tiny village called Sanlúcar la Mayor we saw two huge towers that seemed to have an incredibly bright light ema...

Sevilla Just outside Sevilla at a little place called Santiponce is Itálica, the remains of an old Roman city. Over the centuries much of it was raided to build other towns and cities and so it consists mostly of foundations spread out over a very large and dusty site. The site is slowly being excavated and parts of it rebuilt ('restored') but the only major structure of note is the amphitheatre. This is pretty impressive and, while you can't go up into t...