Heading south,

Just as birds like to migrate south for the winter, we old folk have similar desires. The nice forecasters in the Met Office had talked about a wet and windy winter for the UK so we needed little encouragement to board a ferry heading south with quite a late departure from Portsmouth:

It was heading well south too - a 33 hour trip:

The two nights on board the Brittany Ferries ship were fine. The C-Club lounge was, as always, rather a nice place to hide in and the food on offer was OK too. We whiled away the time quite happily, reading and people watching. The grey pound was strongly represented as you would expect. Of course, we don't class ourselves as such. The Captain has no hair left to go grey and the crew has been that colour for many years so....

The track of Salamanca looked pretty odd. For some reason they aborted the normal route going inside the islands off the Brest peninsular and did it rather late on too, see the odd wriggle in the route:

The small kink off Guernsey was to be expected as she crosses the area leading to the TSS that we've mentioned several times before when heading to the Channel Islands by Nordhavn. Lots of ships all concentrated into one area. Perhaps the decision to head around the islands off Brest was because of traffic too? No idea, the sea was nice and calm, visibility was perfect. No matter, with the current oil prices we guess the skipper would be unpopular with Brittany Ferries management. That diversion would have been expensive.

The ferry docks pretty early in Santander - 7am UK time. We had gone really wild and paid for priority disembarkation. Why? Well, it was not that expensive and we knew that there were some long delays as everyone has to submit their biometric data into the EU's border control system now. Another little Brexit gift. Having seen some of the folks on the crossing attempt fairly simple things like filling their plates with food, pouring coffee etc, we fully expected the DIY process of scanning the passport, then fingerprints, then having a photo taken, then answering several questions on the screen to take a long time.

As you can see, we were pretty close to the ramp when it opened at 8am local time, perfectly on time too:

We were off the ship, into the portakabin setup with the entry system terminals, all updated, approved and on the move again within 15 minutes. The £15 for our priority escape was worth every penny. We've waited well over an hour before and that was when passports were just being stamped, a way quicker process. How we hanker for those days of old when you waved your passport at a bored official who saw the cover and nodded you through....

Our first stop was to be Segovia. New place for us and one that we added in to our itinerary as Brittany Ferries had cancelled our original sailing. We had to rebook for two days earlier and so needed an extra two nights on the way south. We are very glad that we did. It was a holiday weekend and the Parador hotel which sits high up on a hill overlooking the city was busy. Our room had a nice balcony, and in the evening, this was the view of the Cathedral:

Absolutely beautiful - that grainy image is the best our phone camera could do at night bearing in mind the distances. In the still early morning we were treated to this spectacle:

and the day just kept getting better. We drove to a parking area closer into town and walked to the Roman Aqueduct. Wow. Built in the first century AD and still in use until 1973:

and situated right in the middle of the city. It was worth climbing the stairs to get the view of it from higher up too:

As we've come to expect in Spain, another stunning Cathedral:

and a beautiful Alhambra as well:

We spent ages walking around the city, enjoying the holiday mood, architecture, cleanliness and cheap coffee.  On the way back we filled up with way cheaper diesel too ((£1.46 per litre compared to the typical £1.98 at home). The evening was rounded off by another excellent Parador dinner. Happy folks.

Maintenance news:

The only blot on the landscape so far has been a 7:30 am message from the boat saying that it had lost mains power. We contacted the marina to be told there was a big outage on three pontoons and that a sparky was on site. Later that day we had a call from the assistant manager to say it was more serious, probably underground cabling and he had seen we were away. Yes, the fridge and freezer were running and needed to be. Two full Sub Zero drawers of food going off and leaking / smelling would not be nice to return to. Luckily since the Lithium battery upgrade we have way more capacity (see earlier posts on that) and we can check on the status remotely too. After a couple of days the picture looked like this:

The batteries had been at about 80% charge when we left, on shore power and were now showing 74% Nothing to worry about yet but we need to keep checking. If the temperature drops to freezing and the little tube heaters kick in, that will be a totally different story. We've no idea or information on when the power problem might be fixed. It might end up as time to get Hugh the helpful assistant manager to fire up the genset for a while. Other boats around us might like an extension cable run to them as well!