I am really messing up good.  The last time I wanted to make  an entry I thought that I should put in a nwe heading that I called “travel day”.  This will have no heading so I can´t say where it will go.  If you can find the last post this will follow.

I slept in until 8:30 so was too late to get a bus to Potes as planned.  Instead I  caught a bus to  Torrelavega at 12:00.The bus station and cafeteria in Torrelavega were clean  so had lunch and looked for the Tourist Office that was marked as being 1km away.  With help I found that it had closed 15 minutes earlier.  Looked for hostals in town but saw none until I came across the train station where I bought a ticket to Cabezon de la Sal.  The temperature was hitting plus 30.  It was a scenic ride with the landscape reminding me of Costa Rica but fortunately the temperature dropped because of higher altitude.  Cabezon is a real neat quiet town but the closest I came to finding a place to stay was a phone number offering rooms.  Unfortunately I couldn´t figure out how to use the phone in the train station.  I did find the Tourist Office on my tour but it was closed until 4:30 and the only remaining train was to leave just after 5:00.  When I bought the ticket there was a long train already standing on the platform and figured that it was mine waiting to leave at 5:07.  Wanting to know which of the 10 coaches was mine I asked a security guy who just referred me to two approaching railway employees.  One was a woman who spoke good English and said I could take any coach and board right where we were standing.  She added that I would be more comfortable if I sat in the shade until 10 minutes before departure though.  When that interval passed nothing had happened so I thought that I should take matters into my own hands and tried to open the door of the coach directly in front of me.  It was locked so I tried the next and the next with the same result.  The security guy must have been watching because he came running to say that this wasn´t my train.  Mine was coming in as soon as this one left which happened about 2 minutes before mine was to leave.  My train was 10 minutes late.  I wonder where I would have gone if I had been able to board the long train.  It isn´t a good idea to take a train that is on your track at the time your train is due.  That got me into trouble in Avignon when I got on a train to Marseille by mistake.  This trip was also very scenic to Unquera but further south than I had wanted.  There was a 2 * hotel across from the station that I passed up preferring to go for a cheaper hostal which I found shortly only to be told by the chatty woman there that it was full of workers during the off season and only available to tourists in the summer.  I passed a cybercafe en route but had to get a place to stay first so I backtracked until it looked like I was out of town going the other way and not looking like a spot for more hostals, which a man confirmed.  Reluctantly I went back to the 2* and predictably didn´t like the rate.  However the receptionist was kind enough to let me know that there indeed was another hostal about 1 km out of town.  It was large, clean but unimpressive at a main intersection and about 1/3 the price of the 2* so it suited me fine.  I got back to the cybercafe at the other side of town 20 minutes before closing.  There was also a Tourist Office next door but it was closed with no indication of what the hours were.  After a bit to eat I made it back to the hostal.

The next day I was up a 8:00 (getting better), walked to town to find the bus to Potes wasn´t until 11:45 so I decided to updat my blog.  However, on a map at the train station there was a trail appearing along the Deva River to Panes so I thought that I would cross the bridge and look for markings.  Sure  enough there was a trail on the far side so I skipped the blog.  I thought that it would be no problem just following the river but the trail started climbing immediately for a km but I imagined that the river was down too far to see and the markings were consistently good.  The scenery was very pastoral, with good views and farm animals along the way (even a couple of friendly people).  After a few kilometres a pretty big blue building dominated the horizon.  It was clearly a community of some kind that I wasn´t expecting.  It was Colombres a town to the west when I had wanted to go south.  I still figured that I could recover and pick up the trail to Panes and there were signs for a Tourist Office.  I thought that it might be in the big blue building but it was an Indian archives museum and the gardiner directed me another 500 m down the road to the Tourist Office that was closed.  However there were maps posted and I learned that my trail would take me to Lanes on the coast, not what I wanted.  I followed a lightly travelled road to Villa Nueva that was in the right direction.  Speaking to a man who was doing some masonry work on his porch, I learned conclusively that there was a trail to Panes BUT it was in bad shape and poorly marked so it would be best to stay on the road.  There was no shoulder and the traffic was neglible but it was one hill after another.  It was supposed to be 9 km  but I think that it was lowballed.  There were a lot of rock cuts, many scenic views, pretty wild flowers.  There was one pen containing three donkeys and a little foal and a couple of waterfalls along the way so it wasn´t boring.  Towards the Panes end mountains were the dominant feature everywhere.  Eventually the road crossed the Deva River and we were in Panes.  I was tired and hungry so took the second no star hotel, Trespalacio.  That doesn´t mean that it was palace-like.  In local history I think that there were three kings in the area and each had his own palace.  Actually the hotel was probably the poshest in town but has suffered over the years.  The Tourist Office in town was temporarily closed but there were decent maps posted indicating some interesting looking trails in the area.  There was also a bus to Potes at 12:05 but I had no idea where to catch it.  In my town tour I passed a library that was closed but saw a sign about a program “computers for everyone”.  I went in to see what it was about and indeed there were a dozen computers there not being used.  The guy in charged apologized but they were about to start a workshop for kids but I could come back at 6:00.  Great.  I also asked about tourist type brochures and he kindly gave me a couple from somewhere.  I examined the brochures and decided that I could skip Potes because the trails here looked interesting.  I decided that if the weather was goodI would take a taxi up to of the trailheads and do a 4 to 5  hour circular trail from there.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 13th, 2007 at 11:32 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.