Day 17 – Comillas to Unquera

Up bright and early this morning – a slightly longer day ahead of us today. Al got some photos of some the amazing buildings on the way out of town. We missed the first turn off today but back tracked and found it (only about 150m) to head inland from the town. Today’s walk took us through the Santa Martin golf course – we actually walked across the 18th fairway and up past the clubhouse and putting green before using the road into the club. You should be able to see a photo with Al and the 18th green – plus 3 German peregrinos who were having a picnic on the fairway. It looked like they were in a blind spot – not where I’d pick to picnic!
After the climb out of the golf club, with no bar/cafe in sight, we stopped for an break and an energy bar. One of the immutable laws of trekking (we have discovered) is that if you stop to have a break, there’s a bar just around the corner, so we had two 15 minute breaks within 15 minutes of each other and then charged into San Vicente de la Barquera, which looked like a lovely town, however the track completely bypassed the town after we crossed the bridge.
Going out of town we bumped into this old bloke who had no English but was determined to tell us he knew a better track to the next town, Serdio, just follow him. We’ve had a few people give us really bad directions over the walk so we walked with him for a bit and then sort of flicked him off by stopping for a drink (of water!). A couple of kilometers further on he’d found another couple and was goon through the same process with them, which they understood, being Spanish themselves. Long story short we took a fairly nice short cut and met five lovely Spaniards who we had lunch with in Serdio!
The remainder of our walk was fairly uninteresting barring a lovely river crossing and we are now in a bit of a nothing town (Unquera) but the room isn’t dusty and doesn’t appear to be near a nightclub so hoping for a good nights rest!
Claiming 26kms today for a total of 356 (I’m sure this no longer of interest but it’s my way of keeping tally of the total distance we end up travelling – every sign seems to have wildly fluctuating estimate of the distance to go!)