Last night's overnighting spot at the Canal de Castilla again proved to be absolutely excellent and - as a bonus - Emma caught a fox on the trail cam overnight.
Today's mainly been a day of covering ground. It would have been great / be great to dawdle more than we have, but time, tide and ferries wait for no man and we have to be in Cherbourg by Wednesday evening.
As something of a ground-covering / dawdling compromise we decided to back-country the start and end of the driving day, and take to the Autovia for a couple of hours in between.
That worked out as planned but the start and end of the day turned out to be very different experiences indeed.
The 'start' was a very chilled bumble along more of Castilla y León's ghostly quiet roads that also allowed for frequent and unhindered stops to check out anything of interest that caught our eye. Amongst the things that did were some achingly archetypal and atmospheric sleepy Spanish hamlets, and also a flock of entirely-new-to-us birds in the form of Calandra larks. Until today, we didn't even know this species existed.
The 'end' was an altogether more stressful and involved navigation of the sinuous and comparatively highly populated roads of the Basque country. The Basque region is extremely mountainous, which fairly obviously limits opportunities for populations and infrastructure to randomly sprawl, and instead largely limits human activity to the tracts of valleys nestled between steeply sided mountains.
For about the last 40km of today's drive we found ourselves in one such steeply sided valley totally dominated by endless and depressing urban and industrial sprawl. Gone were the quiet roads and archetypal Spanish villages of this morning to be replaced by a conveyor belt of a road system and drab and foreboding multi-storey conurbations. It was exactly like all of the rest of Spain isn't.
We've been through the Basque country before and though it isn't all like this, it still looks and feels very different to the rest of Spain. The language is ancient and unfathomable, the architecture is utterly dissimilar, and the people comport themselves differently. It's a palpable change and if any region that has striven (and continues to strive) for independence from a mother nation should be independent, this is probably it. I have to be honest, Euskadi, for all it's natural history interest and striking landscapes often leaves me feeling wrong-footed and uneasy. In fairness, the ongoing grey, cold and damp conditions probably aren't helping with my mindset on this particular occasion.
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, given the pressure on land, finding an overnighting spot tonight was heavy going. It was beginning to look like the best achievable might literally be off to one side of a relatively quiet road, but even the relatively quiet roads here are, well... not that quiet. Fortunately, a tricky muddy, steep and narrow forest track that serves a state-owned logging operation presented itself right at the eleventh hour so we engaged the low-ratio box then slithered and bounced our way to the spot were now hunkered (pic).
Oddly enough, we've purely coincidentally ended up parked right next to an old and barely discoverable cairn that demarkates three historic Basque regions, and - nearer still - to yet more abandoned but perfectly serviceable footwear. This makes three lots of carefully abandoned and perfectly wearable footwear in my approximate size that have basically marked our exact overnighting spot across France, Shetland and now Euskadi.
Emma rode her bike in the cold and damp mountains whilst I contemplated the oddness of things.
This post was composed at 21:30 on Saturday 5th April from our intended overnighting spot:
N 43.12338°, W 02.49620°
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:43.12338%2C-02.49620 
