Day 7 to Vilalba

We started the day by looking around the town that we stayed in, Gijon. It has a nice beach, a boat harbor and an old section. It was a fun town to just walk in. Then we headed west. We got caught up in several downtown areas with the streets running in random directions. With only a map of Spain we made a few bad turns and subsequent U turns. We slowly worked our way west. I really enjoy the traffic and all the strange signals and road directions.

There is a high speed road that goes along the north coast. Except for a few places where they are still working on it we could roll along at 140 KPH with no problem. To see the small towns we would get off the highway and turn toward the shore. The small towns are quaint and fun. Some are now tourist towns but many are as they have been for years.

The new road is awesome. It is just a series of high bridges and tunnels with some stretches of ground between them. Some of the bridges are just huge. They are several hundred feet high and go for as long as a kilometer. In one section they were making a new bridge and there was a huge machine on the truncated bridge extending the bridge as it went. We have not seen construction like this in the states ever. They are beautiful roads.

We continued west and then turned south to our next Parador in Vilalba. The country there is not as quaint as it was up on the coast and in some places looks like Mexico. The Parador is a beautiful new hotel in the center of the city built around an old 14^th century fortress tower.