The time had come to leave the happy confines of our apartment in Los Alcazares and drive north to pick-up the thirty-hour Bilbao-to-Portsmouth ferry. We needed to get Yoko back into Britain to sell her before embarking on the next leg of our travels.

The drive didn’t take anywhere near as long as we had expected and there really wasn’t a lot to see along our way. As we approached Bilbao a day earlier than expected, we parked-up with the surfers in the nearby city of St. Sebastian and explored a bit — we even caught a train to France for lunch (although the food was so awful we really wished that we hadn’t!).

Nowadays, with the no-frills airlines carting folks around for next-to-nothing, it seems as though the ferry companies have reinvented themselves as “mini-cruises” in which they’ll put on stage-shows (and games of bingo) in an attempt to sell you much alcohol/food/duty-free. In all fairness, it’s all good clean family fun although how anyone can spend a total of sixty hours (thirty there, thirty back) on a boat to spend a morning in the port of Bilbao is quite beyond me!

We arrived back on UK soil at Portsmouth and quickly got ourselves on the road to Wales. It was cold and drizzling, but it felt good to be back.