Day 8 – Ripoll to Santa Cruz de la Serós

Pyrenees 2018

Day 8 – Ripoll to Santa Cruz de la Serós

Let’s start with mountain pictures for a change…

This reminded  me of films where people are escaping from something and find themselves reaching a ‘dead end’
 
The position for this shot was not quite as precarious as it appears (I did not hang around for long though)
 
I need to either go round, over or through mountains as far as the eye can see (and further)
 
And I have chosen roads like this…today is going to take a while, I left at 07:30 to amke sure I had enough time

Eventually I get to the town I am staying in, but I am a little early and despite it being a small place there are regular bus loads of tourists. An ‘old’ monastery is sign posted up the hill, so I decide to go investigate.

The following photo is kind of illustrative of how far you have to go to not really get anywhere, in this photo I had travelled a couple of miles to simply end up above the town!

But on I continued and was rewarded with this…

The old monastery…


 

The new monastery was several miles further on and was much more modern and absolutely blooming massive. It was clearly setup to benefit from the tourist trade…enough to make me feel uneasy stopping and taking a photo!

Eventually I made it to the B&B at just after 16:30…the only stops were either for fuel or to take photos! Nonetheless I headed down for a wonder round the town, there were regular bus loads of tourists very interested in the old church in the town, I took some photos but they are not particularly good or interesting.

The highlight of my wander was this:

Cool door
 

It was amusing communicating with the owner of the B&B, he spoke just about zero English and while I could work out what he was asking me, my answers were not straight forward, but with a little help from Google Translate and some miming we muddled through.

I was then treated to another impressive thunderstorm I could see it coming from the distance and about 30 minutes before it hit the wind started picking up, but the chap next to the B&B was still out watering everything in his garden up until the point the rain actually started to fall!

PS – the name of the place is more than just Santa Cruz, but that is the only bit I can remember at the moment.