They say "no plan survives contact with the enemy", and I'm always ready to adjust things, especially this early in the process. Keen to get my time off cleared with work I hit upon a fairly basic problem - I'd somehow anticipated taking thirteen (13!) days of leave for this trip and still having enough left to give Caroline a decent and well-earned holiday later in September.

This - fair to say over-optimistic - idea did not bear out when I took a first look at my holiday allowance. On the plus side, the work holiday purchase scheme was coming into effect exactly this week. Without thinking about it too much I snapped up 5 extra days, wincing only slightly at the pay I'd lose (it always looks a bit alarming when it's listed in one place, but I'd nearly always rather have more free time than the money). But even with this extra it was clear I needed to reign in my plans a bit.

I'm still constrained by the schedule of the ferries from Plymouth - the (same ship) sails only on Wednesdays and Sundays, and likewise back on Thus and Monday. I briefly considered whether going from Portsmouth (quite a bit of a way) further up the south coast might be possible - for a while I thought I'd found a crazy loophole and a ferry that took less than 18 hours, until I realised they actually involved two nights at sea. No thank you!

I spent quite a while on Monday playing with the combinations and figuring the way to maximise my time. Sailing out on a Sunday was a poor choice - I'd waste the whole weekend and only arrive late on Monday anyway, effectively losing three days of cycling. Instead, if I set out on the Wednesday lunchtime sailing, I'd get almost a whole day on Thursday. This would then dovetail with a return on Monday-week, so giving me something like 10-11 days cycling. Pretty good!

There was just one fly in the ointment causing a major irritation. I could only do this by booking off a whole 10 days holiday. This would mean we couldn't have a full two weeks for our main vacation - which seemed seriously unfair on Caroline. But infuriatingly I was just half a day of leave short! 

After more than a few hours of playing with the timetables and realising anything better was impossible, I made one simple change - moving the whole plan 1 week forward (so nearer!) - and found an amazing discovery. Weirdly, this meant the outbound ferry now left in the late afternoon. That would mean I could legitimately work the morning, hop on a lunchtime train, and be in Plymouth by 2pm with plenty of time. Meaning I could save that critical half a day leave!

Even better, I'd still arrive on Thursday lunchtime, so be able to get half a day riding in to warm up. The plan would give me ten and a half days cycling for just 9.5 days of leave. I couldn't beat this, so booked the ferries and cabin that minute.  £500 pounds (!!!) lighter, I was still pretty pleased with my choice.

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This does mean some adjustments to the plan. Assuming I want to get into the mountains and not yomp across Iberia as fast as possible, it's looking  unlikely I'll get to Portugal (sorry Portugal, you're an underrated country that always seems to lose out in my travel plans). I could still easily get to the coast of Galicia though. So my new ultimate target is Finisterre (Fisterra). The other change is I likely now will finish up in Santiago - it does sound pretty cool, and it's also centre of communications for Galicia.