Greetings from Laredo!

I left Manchester at 6 yesterday morning, after a night of drinking Polish beer. In my typical form, I almost missed my two bus connections and my flight from London Stansted to Santander, Spain. Though I still have yet to spend any time in London outside of the bus, I feel like i got a fairly good tour on the two buses that seemed to meander endlessly through the city. I saw Parliament, Big Ben, the London Bridge, the Thames River Gateway and all of the Olympic construction, various ostentatious Imperial monuments, and a number of neighborhoods and roads that I recognized from Rolling Stones songs.

Once I finally got there, i saw Krisztian, who seemed especially jubilant to be around someone who speaks his language for the first time in weeks. We re-assembled the bike, loaded everything on it, and set off to ride from the Santander airport to downtown. It was pouring, and we had to ride on a road that was nearly a highway. Not the best start to the trip. We stayed with a guy named Manuel, a high school philosophy teacher, who I met on the Couch Surfing site.

At the moment, I am in Laredo- a beach town in the Cantabria region. We set up our tents at a campground and headed downtown to relex. It was my first day of riding, and I think that we went about 45 kilometers. I learned that, as grueling as it might be, a huge hill is worth enduring of there is a 12th Century chapel on top. I am sore, but feel pretty good. We will be heading to Bilbao in the morning, and should get there some time tomorrow evening. I´ll upload some photos soon.