The Long Trip to Bilbao

 We're not cruising types so sitting on a boat chugging across the Bay of Biscay to Spain is just plain boring! We got on the Brittany Ferry "Galicia" at 7pm on Thursday, will spend all day Friday on board, then arrive at Bilbao at 8am on Saturday morning. It's a comfortable enough boat that's not very full so pleasent enough but the entertainment provided in the bar is definitely not for us so we stay firmly seated in the C-Club lounge for the duration of the voyage.

There is a buffet service with meals brought out at appropriate times together with a regular supply of wine and constant hot drinks; we're well catered for. We could have gone down to the Azul restaurant but lethargy has set in and we prefer not to give up a nice seat by the window; we don't want to eat too much anyway.

The saving grace of these trips is the conversations you have with other, similarly minded passengers. However this time there was nobody interesting, just some people who insisted on competing in a loud voice with each other, bragging about the places they'd gone to. This was in sharp contrast to the return trip which had many Classic Car Rally entrants who had driven 2000 miles from Geneva and some surprisingly interesting conversations with bikers.

There were no whales or dolphins to see so we resigned ourselves to a day of reading punctuated by an occasional promenade around the limited deck space. I soon polished off a copy of the Marine Quarterly then started Precipice, by Roger Harris, an ideal thriller for travel.

Mid afternoon we had some excitement - an announcement by the Capitan that one of the engines had stopped working! Not that we'd noticed, so we could only go at reduced speed from then on and would arrive two hours late at our destination.  More time for reading.....


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