Day 9 - Barriers

We were due to leave Porto today and start a series of short hops back home. This however, meant breaking our bikes out of the car park. You see they wanted us to pay 75 euros per bike which we thought was a bit steep, especially as we only used up one spot.

The plan was to ride through the gap at the side of the barrier but as we were getting the bikes redy, two security guards covered the exits, they were on to it. We had to fall back to plan B. plan B involved waving our arms around, arguing and not understanding. Plan C it was then, we payed the hotel instead and got a discount.

We rode for a while before stopping at Mc Donald's and then found some properly good roads, fast sweepers where we got to explore the bikes a bit more. From McDs we beat the sat nav time by 20 mins and that included two stops!

We were now in Ponferrada, where we'd stop for one night. We were using a municipal car park again,  where we were again thwarted by the barriers, Steve had pressed the button and Tim had gone through, but we'd all moved forward so we were stuck as the barrier had closed behind Tim. Oops.

When we did get out, we made our way to the hotel reception and Steve got accosted by a struggler wino who was dressed up like a knight. We jousted our way into the hotel to find that the receptionist didn't speak English but he did speak German. So Steve spoke to him in German and tried not to mention the war.

Tim went ahead while we were checking in, and when Mark and Steve got to the room he was already stood in the corridor outside the room in his pants as he was too hot. As soon as the door opened he dashed in to destroy the toilet before he'd even seen his bed.

After we'd de-fumed the bathroom and showered we went to get some drinks and snacks for the room, it was Mark's happy day as there was a shop that sold a selection of giant giant strawberry cables. There isn't a photo of them as they didn't last that long.

Steve had planned this stop which meant that he'd done the research and found out where to go etc. Apparently there was nothing here, it was only a small town with a couple of bars. In reality the town was dominated by a massive castle and everywhere you looked there were bars heaving with tourists.

We chose a restaurant with 4 stars from Trip Advisor. We didn't have such a good experience though. Mark asked the waiter if they had wifi, he answered 'yes' and then walked off without giving us the password. We ordered our food but Steve's meal didn't arrive, so we asked the waiter who called us a lier and said that we hadn't ordered anything.

When we did get Steve's food, it was cold, we complained but the waiter just walked off. Tim got onto Trip Advisor, and lets just say that they no longer have 4 stars.

We stopped by a busy bar at the side of the castle, which emptied as soon as we had arrived, has no one told them that the crusades are over? We took over the bar anyway, Steve sorted the music out and Tim got the shots in.

Several drinks and shots later we'd turn the place into a karaoke bar which only ended when Steve kept playing Mumford and Sons. The bar keep was a good laughed and joined in with the shots, although he took offence when time asked him 'are you local?' As he though he'd said 'are you loco?'. The bar mans name was now Loco.

On the way back to the hotel Steve fell over, but he still made it back in one piece, all of those rank shots of Jays washing up liquid had took their toll. However, he did have a bed incident also, while mark and Tim were innocently fast asleep he somehow fell out...