Rain was forecast for Tuesday, so I booked 2 nights in Pamplona, and will take the bus to Bilbao on Tuesday for the day. Forecast scorchio again from Wed.

The earliest breakfast was available was 0930 so I didn't get off till 1055. But that was ok as I reckoned I only had about 50km to cover today. Breakfast was juice, bread, jamon, gingerbread, jam & coffee.

Today's journey took me from Aragon into Navarre, which both is and isn't the Basque Country. The first part was an easy downhill to Sanguesa, then following the River Aragon to Liedena, from where I followed the NA-2420 westwards. This is a collector road for the A-21, otherwise known as the Pyrenees Motorway. After a few km (at junction 36) the NA-2420 crossed from the South to the North side of the motorway, then at junction 35 it crossed back to the South. However junction 35 was very large and complicated, and not shown in enough detail on my map, so I got rather confused. Luckily another cyclist came along, saw me puzzling over my map and offered to help. This was the first of a few times that I benefited from the kindness of strangers in Spain.

I could have carried on the NA-2420, but that led straight to Pamplona airport, and would have been a somewhat noisy, unpleasant and possibly dangerous route. So following the helpful cyclist's advice I took the NA-150 which initially headed North-East, then curved round following the Rio Irati, to head West towards Pamplona. This was quite a pleasant route on fairly quiet roads, until reaching Pamplona itself. The Hotel Eslava was right in the centre of Pamplona, and was quite easy to find. After checking in and freshening up, I walked round to the (underground) coach station and got a return ticket to Bilbao for tomorrow. Then I walked down to the bullring and back to the city centre via the narrow roads where crazy folk 'run the bulls' on the feast of San Fermin every July (see photo of sculpture). I must say I had never seen so many people on crutches as in Pamplona! I found a nice restaurant in the main square, and afterwards watched a bit of TV. Interesting to see that 'Millionnaire' on Spanish tv only goes up to €100,000.