Arriving in Santander by Ferry – Top Tip

Motorcycle touring. Arriving Santander. Important SatNav issue.

Website: https://www.ridespain.co.uk
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RideSpain.co.uk

arriving Sant andere the first tip is don’t go down to your bike too early after the ship has docked in santand there you’ve got a good 45 minutes before you need to go down to your bike if you try and get down there too early you’ll probably find yourself stuck in a stuffy stairwell waiting to gain access and when you do make it to your bike it can be quite hot in the bottom deck it’s certainly going to be noisy and there’s going to be some exhaust fumes so hang around upstairs and uh follow the crew members instructions and don’t be in a rush to get back down to your bike once you’ve got it and you’ve exited uh we are now on our way to the passport booths there’s some criticism about how long it takes to get through passport control in Sant andere but it is an awful lot quicker than Plymouth in Plymouth if you have a fullface crash helmet they’ll make you take it off to check your passport they don’t do that in santande there’s about eight passport booths uh in Spain um they need to check your passport and stamp it and it takes them what roughly a minute to do this so if there’s eight of them uh in operation they can do 40 every five minutes I’m not 100% sure but I reckon what are there 30 bikes in front of us in this queue and uh 30 cars so you’re likely to be in this queue more than 10 or 12 minutes it may feel like it’s longer but it it really isn’t and anyway relax you’re on holiday welcome to Spain also don’t forget your uh UK sticker the the Spanish don’t like a UK sticker that’s incorporated as part of your number plate they insist on a full-size UK sticker somewhere on the back of your bike now what we’re likely to do while we’re waiting here is load our saavs up now we may have bought a preloaded route with us we may just punch a destination in and that can cause problems because the the satellite navigation isn’t very good at finding its way out of santande ferryport and there’s a there’s a good reason for that and I’ll show you what that is in a minute and I’ll also explain what I do to overcome that problem what we’ve got here is Google Maps and we’re just looking down on Sant andere Fairport that clip we’ve just cut away from the bikes on this little bit of Road here heading towards passport control now if you look on the left I’ve already got potz set as my destination and I’m going to put this as my starting point anywhere along this road click just there and what your satav is trying to do is uh guide you out the fair port just here but if we zoom in on that and drop our little man down what we can see is a fence you can’t exit the ferry port there although Google and your satnav probably thinks you can so it’s going to try and keep guiding you to this fence which is no good whatsoever so what I do when I schedule is I don’t put my pin there because what we’ve got to do is we follow the the exit route out the ferry port which is along here over this bridge over two roundabouts round a Bend to two more roundabouts I put my exit pin just there so as I’m as I’m coming through passport control and exiting my satnav will pick up my starting point um it may not happen until I’m roundabout these two roundabouts and then it does pick it up rather than uh trying to turn me around and take me back the whole time so that makes uh for a lot more comfortable stress-free Journey one more thing I will mention this roundabout here is quite new it was finished in 2023 and your satnav still wants you to take you this old Route and there’s nothing wrong with old Route it is slightly more complicated um picking up you your your Junctions correctly particularly we’re riding on the right hand side side of the road and we’ve got a lot of things to take in we’ve got a lot new experiences um when we’re riding in Spain particularly for the first time if we can keep it simple it’s a lot better so when I plan a route and any of the routes that that I sell I put my starting point there and I pin my second point just there and this is fairly straightforward straight over the first roundabout to the next one first exit keep left and you’re away obviously that only works if you’re going to Poes if you’re going somewhere else well then don’t follow those directions hope you found some of that helpful guys thanks for watching and we’ll catch you again for