Woke up early but decided to wait for an hour to make sure there would be no ice on the next mountain pass at Puerto de Somosierra. As a result I missed the clear road by about ten minutes and had to slipstream a snowplough to get to the hotel about two kilometres from the top. The driving snow and thick cloud started really suddenly and I was lucky to spot the flashing lights of the snowplough at the start of the slip road to the hotel. The word was that this short stretch of road was the only bit to 
have snow, everywhere else had rain. By three o’clock I gave up and booked into the hotel for the night. A bedraggled English biker came into the bar around four o’clock having come from Bilbao in one day on his new Suzuki Bandit with his wife driving immediately behind in a car to give him some protection. He decided that he could go really slowly for two or three kilometres to get past the snow if his wife put on the car’s hazard flashers jut behind him. He returned about twenty minutes later having dropped the bandit, left it at the hotel and went on to Madrid in the car.
I was feeling pretty down at this stage but the day started to look up as an interesting collection of snowbound travellers built up in the bar. Two Dutch guys in a 30 year old VW beetle were competing in the Amsterdam to Dakar Challenge but like me they hadn’t prepared for snow. An English semi-pro musician and his wife were on the first stage of a move to Spain and turned into serious party animals once they accepted they were there for the night. He even performed a fine rendition of ‘the fields of Athenry’ for the Irish contingent. A Moroccan on his first trip home to Morocco for some years got quite excited about the places I had been to in his country and couldn’t believe that I had done it all solo on my first visit. The bar staff stayed on at the end of their shift and we had a good old-fashioned Irish pub lock-in on a snowbound mountain pass in Spain.
have snow, everywhere else had rain. By three o’clock I gave up and booked into the hotel for the night. A bedraggled English biker came into the bar around four o’clock having come from Bilbao in one day on his new Suzuki Bandit with his wife driving immediately behind in a car to give him some protection. He decided that he could go really slowly for two or three kilometres to get past the snow if his wife put on the car’s hazard flashers jut behind him. He returned about twenty minutes later having dropped the bandit, left it at the hotel and went on to Madrid in the car.I was feeling pretty down at this stage but the day started to look up as an interesting collection of snowbound travellers built up in the bar. Two Dutch guys in a 30 year old VW beetle were competing in the Amsterdam to Dakar Challenge but like me they hadn’t prepared for snow. An English semi-pro musician and his wife were on the first stage of a move to Spain and turned into serious party animals once they accepted they were there for the night. He even performed a fine rendition of ‘the fields of Athenry’ for the Irish contingent. A Moroccan on his first trip home to Morocco for some years got quite excited about the places I had been to in his country and couldn’t believe that I had done it all solo on my first visit. The bar staff stayed on at the end of their shift and we had a good old-fashioned Irish pub lock-in on a snowbound mountain pass in Spain.
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