Phil & Barbs "Lightning Tours.": Sunday 29th June

Sunday 29^th June

Like an early morning bailiff the rain and hailstones relentlessly banged on the motorhome throughout the night, hoping to wake us. However its persistence merely blotted out the sounds from the nearby road, so we continued in our slumbers until around 9am when we decided to move on towards Benasque.

The £400 Sat Nav continued with its daily lies until a more forceful approach managed to squeeze the truth from it…55 miles to Benasque and Camping Aneto.

I’ve been a bit surprised at how good the roads through the Pyrenees have been. I’d been expecting slow, narrow winding roads but there are quite a few fast stretches. Yes we’ve had two 10 mile sections that have been really slow but generally we’ve got to our destinations in good time. The N260 stretch from Montanuy to Castrjon de Sos was full of pot holes and quite winding, but this was offset by the fact that there was very little traffic on it.

Eventually we arrived at Camping Aneto around 12 noon. What a great location for a site, the Rio de Estos actually runs through the site and so the site has a couple of lovely stone bridges that allow you to drive over the river to the main camping area. All facilities are excellent and there is free wifi across most of the site. We’d been looking for a site that had good walking routes close to it so we were pleased to find that the GR111 walking route is signposted from the site.

We set off at 1:30 to walk this route. It was a beautiful linear walk taking us about 2 and a half hours to get to the Refuge de Estos at the end of the valley. The Refuge offers sleeping accommodation all year round for walkers, cost between 8 and 16 euros a night. Meals and refreshments are also available although I noticed they were selling small cans of beer for 3 euros! After looking around the Refuge we returned along the same path taking 2 hours to get back to the site (the outward route is 80% uphill). On our return we spotted a huge block of ice the size of a football pitch that must have fallen from the mountains and landed in the river valley.

The weather was ideal for walking , temperatures around 23c, blue skies with clouds that slowly and elegantly moved over the mountain tops like giant hot air balloons.

Tired and aching we headed straight for the site bar.