Arrival in Bilbao and Drive to Cabrera Almeria

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A little choppy from Roskoff to Bilbao but I have experienced worse conditions - it did tend to throw you around the corridor as you walked around the boat.

I stayed in the cabin and watched the sea - mainly boring.

In the middle of the night I looked out of the cabin window and could see Orion standing vertically in the sky over the Bay of Biscay.

The arrival in Bilbao followed the traditional disembarkation chaos when cabins had to be left to allow cleaners to get in and access to car decks not yet available. As usual people got in their cars before they were told they could although it made no difference to their time of exit! One husband whose wife was sitting next to me waiting patiently to be called to Car Deck One was shouted at by her impatient husband standing by the lift "Are we getting off this bloody boat or not!!" She ignored him and he went off to the car deck.

I decided to avoid the chaos around Madrid and took the AP68 motorway and A23 down towards Valencia - a cool 32 Euros for that leg! I was going to go down the AP7 an excellent coastal motorway to Almeria but based on the AP68 experience(32 euros) went down the parallel free A7 instead. Pretty similar roads really but the AP7 is usually deserted whereas the A7 was quite busy - not at the level of the M6 at Birmingham on a Friday afternoon but relatively busy.

I arrived at the Cabrera Arch at 9.45 p.m. having spent 12 hours on a near 1000km drive.  It had been fairly wet all the way down and was cloudy in Cabrera.