Friday September 5, 2014

We left the hotel early after a free but small breakfast.  Toast and jam and a coffee was the free breakfast.  We bought 2 sandwiches and 2 more coffees to keep us going, even though we were only going to the train station.

I am not sure why we had decided to take the train to Palencia other than we didn’t want another day of hills and we had a warmshowers host for tomorrow and we would not be able to cycle to Palencia in one day.  Anyway, I had checked on the train times and we had decided to take the second train of the day out of Aguilar de Campoo, mistake. The second train didn’t have any space for bicycles we had to take the third train which left at 5:30 pm and arrived in Palencia at 7:00pm.

We spent a day at the train station.  We arrived at the station in plenty of time to catch the second train.  The second train left at 10:44, we arrived at 10:00am. We then waited for 7.5 hours to catch the next train.  I made sure the bikes could go on the train.  When the 5:30 train arrived we put the bikes on the train with the conductor complaining bitterly about bicilettas.  \”Too big bikes, too small space\”.  He wanted us in the last carriage not the carriage where we got on.  At the next station we got of the train and got back on in the last carriage, he still complained that our bags were too big, but too bad we had tickets to say the bikes were allowed. Apparently regular bikes are allowed but not touring bikes with large panniers.

While we were waiting at the train station, we reserved a place in a hostal near the station. We found the hostal quite easily once we headed in the right direction! We  had a shower in the smallest shower cubicle in the world even I banged my elbows on the side of the cubicle.

Palencia is supposed to be a really nice place to visit but we unfortunately didn’t spend any time there at all except to sleep.