Garry McGivern’s Portuguese bike ride, Thursday 20th-August-2009 Ribadeo to Santander. 12 Miles. I spent much of last night trying to find a way of getting to Bilbao so I could catch that ferry! After missing my train yesterday, and consequently my ferry home from Santander. And after a few hours of looking at train routes and timetables, I think I may have found a way. It’s not as easy as you think. A lot of trains don’t allow bikes on them. But with a combination of tourist trains and cycling, I should be able to reach Bilbao on Friday. Well, that was the plan!
My first train today was a three and half hour journey from Ribadeo to Oviedo. Then from Oviedo, I had a five-hour train ride on the old narrow gauge railway to Santander. It’s the tourist train that stops at every single station. Hence the five-hour train ride.
I arrived in Santander on time at 8.20 this evening, ready for my sixty-mile overnight bike ride to Bilbao. For some strange reason, just before leaving Santander, I decided to phone ahead just to make sure that there was space on the ferry. And just as well I did, they’d changed the ferry timetable in the last week or so, and the ferry had left today! But the good news is there’s now a ferry from Bilbao on Sunday! If I’d only known all this yesterday, it would have saved me a lot of stress!
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