We sleep long and deep, it is very quiet all night. When we wake it feels cold again, it is, it is 11°C. We breakfast and watch the six campers that arrived after 8.15pm last night (when we had closed our blinds), service their campers and leave. We service Hymer and are on our way by 11.00am, there are still two campers left on the car park.

From Aguilar de Campóo, we take the N-611 and then A-67 towards Reinosa. This is a good dual carriageway road, which climbs slowly and persistently all the way to Reinosa. Here, we leave the A-67 and take the smaller road, C-171 towards Requejo and the Embalse del Ebro (Ebro reservoir). The mighty Ebro river passes right through the Cantabrian mountains, which we have to cross to get to the north coast and Santander. The reservoir is immense, but very shallow, waiting for the autumn rains I suspect as the rain of October has not started yet. There are other signs of autumn all around, yellow poplar trees and horse chestnut trees laden with ripe conkers, falling all over the pavement. No small boys here to collect them.

We pass through small towns of Monegro and Corconte. We turn north into the Cantabrian mountains on the N-623 and begin a serious climb, a gradient of 10% to an altitude of 1011m at Puerto del Escudo. Here, at Mirador de Cabaña, we stop for lunch with a magnificent view all around. When there are no vehicles it is silent apart from the wind and the tinkle of the cow bells… just like Austria. We sit and watch the heavy lorries crawling up the hill and those going down having to take care with the steep gradient. Next it will be our turn.

Going down was trickier than climbing up, the downward hill is relentless. Our Hymer motorhome has a special facility built into the gearbox for descending long steep hills, it is engaged by pressing a button on the dashboard. It holds us back remarkably well, but after a few kilometres there is a smell of something hot, so I disengaged it and reverted to braking.

Down and down and down an equally steep gradient of 10% is not easy in a 4.5 ton camper! We continue down for many kilometres to Vargas, through the Valle de Luena, a green and verdant valley that passes between the mountains and runs with the Rio Sonora. A total contrast to the dry, arid and yellow countryside of the past few weeks. We pass through small towns of San Miguel, Los Pandos and Ontaneda, all with their own local style of houses with balconies covered with red pelargonium, not dissimilar to Austrian style houses.

We arrive at Santander with three hours to spare, so drive to San Romano near the coast and stop for a break and a light tea of lentil humus (a local speciality which is delicious) and lomo ham omelette. We arrive at the ferry port at 6.30pm and find five very long lines of traffic queueing to board the ferry (Port Aven). We check-in and join the second line of motor homes. Around 7.30pm we start to board, we do not have long to wait and are very soon onto the ferry. We find our cabin on deck 5, but cleaning is still in progress so we have to wait till about 8.15pm before we get into our room.

By the time we get back on deck to take photographs, it has gone dark and the last few cars and motor homes are boarding at around 9.00pm.

We depart on time at 9.15pm and have a quiet night of it.

Our Hymer motorhome trip to Roman and Moorish Sites in Spain

Keywords: Motorhome, Hymer, B544, Premiumline, Spain, Motorhome trip Europe, camping car europe, camping car tour