In February and March 2025, I took 4 friends to scout Northern Spain on Can-Am Spyders for a potential future tour with a larger group. We intended to visit both Spain and Portugal, but we never got past Spain. That is the story of this blog, both good and with a little bit of disappointment.
Early in 2024, I had a conversation with Paul Rawlings, the owner of Celtic Rider, about scouting to help expand his motorcycle touring offerings into Spain and Portugal. The only motorcycle tour currently offered on the Iberian Peninsula was on two wheels. We both felt that a Spyder offering could be successful, so he and I researched a possible route and the planning of getting several Can-Am Spyders to Spain. The best way seemed to be taking the overnight ferry from Ireland to Bilbao, Spain, and starting the ride from there. So that’s what I did with three of my intrepid friends and my wife, Bev.
The following image is a map of the plan I had when this all started. Bilbao is at point “A,” and the plan was to start and end there, using the ferry to connect us to Ireland. As you can see from this original plan, we intended to ride west in Spain, then south to Porto in Portugal. We would return to Bilbao after visiting Salamanca and several other smaller cities in Spain’s interior. Well, you know what they say about “the best-laid plans”, right? In our case, they went askew fairly quickly.
I chose the riders carefully as I wanted a small group of folks that would be easy-going and be flexible if things did not go according to our initial plan. I also wanted them to be familiar with riding Spyders and the coordination of working with Celtic Rider. So, the team was me, my wife Bev, and our friends Deb, BJ, and Bell.
This is the arrival scene at Celtic Rider (on the right). Things got into order quickly once our bags were unpacked, then repacked onto the Spyders.
We left Celtic Rider to head to the port for the ferry in Rosslare. It was an uneventful ride, but it was cold. Remember this: we left incredibly early in the riding season. And since we were in Ireland, of course, it was raining gently.
The ferry process was straightforward, and we waited our turn after all the large commercial trucks to bring the Spytders on board. I was the only one in our group who had taken an overnight ferry before, so I tried to prepare everyone as best as I could for the trip. It was going to take a few hours more than one day to get to Bilbao. That would be 36 to be correct!
The ferry trip was uneventful. During the ferry trip, I saw that my intention to use a GPS was not going to work. I repeatedly attempted to load all my intended routes into a Garmin Zumo GPS with a European base map but ran into many problems that I didn’t have the equipment to solve. We were going to need to be dependent on Google Maps. This was not going to be ideal, but I was optimistic about it working. On previous trips to Europe, I had compared GPS routes to Google Maps and often found more precision in what Google presented than what Garmin presented. This subject could be a separate blog as I have many observations that might be valuable to my readers. I’ll save that for another time.
Our debarkation from the ship was easy enough following the traffic, and we soon left the port to enter the seaside curvy area to the East of Bilbao, heading for Pamplona to the South. I had planned for about 150-200 kilometers a day, which I thought would leave time to explore and try variations on some of the roads. We soon learned that the early-season weather was going to inhibit my best-laid plans.
We reached Pamplona that first night, but all of us were dead tired and cold. We had the bad luck of being in Spain during some really nasty weather events that were impacting the whole country. Our heated gear and our rain gear would get used almost every day. My plans would be punted, and I tried repeatedly to keep us out of the worst weather.
From Pamplona, we turned westward to go across what is usually the beautiful wine country of La Rioja. We were greeted by more rain and fog. I was starting to be worn down, and it was only the 2nd day in Spain. At times there was fog down to the road and we could only ride at 10 mph and still see in front of us.
Click here to read part 2 of this blog entry.
