The Road to Valdeon

This morning we woke up at 8am, that’s been one of our longest lay ins yet, mainly because Ellie slept with her headphones on and I had earplugs in because there was a dog relentlessly barking all night. At 10am we left our camp spot with no sign of the much talked about bread lady and breakfast and headed 60 miles north to the medieval town of Cangas De Onis. We found parking for Wanda in a large car park that was rapidly filling up when we arrived and set off through the town to find the ancient bridge that I had seen in La Vuelta. It was a beautiful bridge, and very picturesque and I don’t understand why people have to walk over it and take selfies. Surely it would be better to stand on the new bridge and get a selfie of the old bridge behind if that’s your thing. It was comical to see people standing there trying to get shots of themselves with the bridge when they were standing on it.
From cangas de onis we were heading for a park up further up the coast that had electric. Wanda’s leisure batteries needed abit of a recharge as we’ve only been doing small journeys and caining the power again. We set off and then Ellie mentioned that she would rather like to do the cable car ride in the picos de europa so we stopped and recalculated our journey, turned around headed back through cangas de onis and up into the mountains.
We took the N-625 mountain pass which was one of the most scenic and beautiful drives we have done. The roads weren’t to steep so Wanda didn’t struggle, it was full of tight turns following the path of the river, we crossed over arched bridges and passed hundreds of waterfalls and there was even a mountain goat that jumped off the side of the cliff right into our path. We climbed over the summit which was 3ft deep in snow and headed down the other side on a 9% gradient and after 90 minutes of driving we arrived in the tiny mountain town of Valdeon.
The airè we found is probably the nicest one yet with our own private electric supply and fresh running mountain water pumped from the tap. The only worrying thing is, we are the only ones here. There are snow boards 3ft high across all the doors and windows and the town is dead.
We’ve checked the weather and it says 7°c and rain so we’re hoping to be alright, and the locals have been down to check that we had paid for the airè online and I’m sure they would have said something if the weather was going to be that bad. Either way, we have electric and we’re warm so if we do get stuck we should be ok.
Tonight we’ll be sleeping listening to the cow bells and wondering if we’ll be going any further in the morning.Read more