Sometimes what you need is a few constraints to focus the mind and get planning firmed up. This weekend this has happened in the most satisfying way, where it doesn't so much feel as options being taken away but more as the naturally right plan emerging.

• Me and Caroline will probably be going for our joint, non-cycling holiday in mid-September. This means that it's worth me taking what she is kind enough not to call my self-indulgent cycling trip a good month or more earlier so there's a decent gap at work.
• Starting a new job it obviously doesn't look great to immediately swan off on holiday. But by late July I will have 4 months or so under my belt, and a break seems pretty reasonable.
• Speaking of which, I can purchase more holiday from work and they're pretty keen we take it - nice!
• I had some serious weather-based reservations about going to Spain in July/August. I didn't realise that the northern coast is so temperate that it's rarely much above 20 degrees, even in high summer! In fact, so notorious is Green Spain for rain that summer months are probably preferable, even for riding. Such a contrast to the rest of the country.
• Ferry tickets are getting expensive and even "selling out" of cheap seats. This is actually a wheeze by the ferry companies to sell more cabins (which are in fact often worthwhile) - it is obligatory to have "accommodation" of the ferry, even if that accommodation is just a seat. 

All of this means that what was a pretty vague bit of dreaming a week or so ago has now lead to a full spate of map-buying a timetable-plotting. I'm excited to get going! Some more constraints helped here:

• I'm certainly going to take the ferry from Plymouth. The ease of getting there (90 mins on all trains from Hayle upcountry), the ease of embarking with the bike (just roll on) and being able to immediately start riding when we arrive 18 hours later is a massive boon. 
• Santander is obviously the target - a Roscoff (FR)-Santander (ES) open-jaw is a tempting idea for a tour, but I'll save that one for later.
• Downsides to the ferry: expense (two hundred and what now?! pounds for the sailing alone) and crossing the Bay of Biscay. I am not the greatest sailor in the world and that crossing can be rough. On the plus side, taking the bike is laughably cheap at just £5 extra.
• The Spanish train system in the north of the country is in tatters. Not only does the lovely narrow gauge FEVE line that runs along the north coast now not run - except as a ludicrously expensive (and slow) luxury train - but it appears to be impossible (really, totally impossible) to travel from Galicia back to Santander without returning to Madrid in an 8-hour extravaganza, which won't take unfolded bikes anyway. 
• So as much as I love rail travel, it's totally out. That leaves three options: (1) describe a big loop and return to Santander; (2) hire a car, stick the bike in the back, and just drive it back to the ferry port; or (3) return by air. Three is out - I don't want the hassle of trying to box the bike at the end of the journey, and then flying back to somewhere in the UK distant from the Westcountry. I'm disinclined to choose a big loop since it likely means returning through a large expanse of Spain (Castille and Leon) that looks flat and arid and I'm not that crazy about.
• Hiring a car one-way and driving it across internationally borders is prohibitively expensive. How expensive? It costs over 10 times the daily rate (Europcar quoting me €2000 to drop off a Portuguese car in Spain - per day). However, even one-way drop off within Spain is fine. With Hertz I can hire a car in e.g. Vigo, 10km away from the Portuguese border, and drive it to Santander for only €120. 

So this pretty much sets up when I'm going. The where is a lot more free-form, and that's the way I like it. The plan is still to head west and probably dip into Portugal, but I'll return to pick up the car in Spain, spend one last night at a modest hotel at the end of the tour, then drop off the car and simply pedal the last 5km or so to the port.