Month: April 2017

Today we crossed the Pyrenees into France, and although the Spanish Catalans say that the region extends into France, I haven’t heard anyone speak anything but French. It’s funny actually how quickly it changed from 100% Spanish/Catalan to 100% French. 30 seconds after crossing the border, a group of motor bikers joined as at the summit and were speaking French.

In Girona, Catalan pride was very evident with the numerous flags and even the local bike advocacy group’s pamphlet was all in Catalan.

We said farewell to our awesome WarmShowers host George and had breakfast at La Fabrica (it was such a fun novelty for us that we had to go back) and made our way towards Figueres. For whatever reason, the route that Strava chose for us as the “most popular” one took us on tiny hiking trails through farmland. It was peaceful and quiet but not ridable in sections on our touring bikes.

It was Sant Jordi day, so there were tons of people in all the city squares and dozens of people asked us to buy roses for “tu novia”.

The Dali museum was a must see stop, and it’s pretty cool, as the museum itself was designed by Dali. We couldn’t go in because we couldn’t find a place to keep our bikes safely, and there was a long line already waiting.

The climb to France was pretty tough, but we were eager to get to our fourth country, so we had the energy for it.

You can tell the country changed because the asphalt on the French side abruptly changed for the better. That only lasted a short time though.

The French side of the Mediterranean has been beautiful so far. We found a great beach-side campground and I’ve been practicing my French. It’s clear that we will have to stretch our budget on this section of the trip as campground, hostels, and food are noticeably more expensive. We will borrow against our future budget in eastern Europe and Asia. It’s also clear that my French is really rusty, as my accent is not understandable by some.

Today reminded me of the French movie Belleville Rendezvous (Triplets of Belleville) as we suffered up the climb and then all the frogs chirping in the campground in France that we haven’t heard much in Spain. You must watch the movie if you like cycling and wacky French movies!

Little did we know that tomorrow is Sant Jordi (Saint George’s) Day in the Catalan region of Spain. After seeing lots of people over the past few days with roses, we finally asked around and learned that on April 23, the guys give girls roses, and the guys get books… Seems a bit of an odd exchange to me, but we’ve seen book stalls popup on the street alongside rose sellers, and everything in the shape of roses, from chocolate to change purses.

Yesterday we rode from Sitges to a small town just north of Barcelona, stopping in Barcelona for lunch. We camped with a Gamping.com host for the night before heading off to Girona today, where we met up with our fantastic host for the evening, who has intrigued us with stories of his past cycling tours and given us great advice for our route tomorrow.

We stopped at a cycling cafe in Girona called La Fabrica, which is known to have pro cyclists visit. We saw hundreds of other serious cyclists out today in the road, at the cafe, and all over town. Finally we fit right in, in our Spandex.

There’s some kind of music festival and street fair going on in Girona, so we found a place to watch the crowd and checked out the popular sights.

On the quiet roads between Barcelona and Girona, we saw a number of working girls, simply sitting on a chair on the side of the road and dressed up really pretty. To be honest, it took us going by 3 or 4 of them to start to ask what’s going on here and then come to the realization. Our suspicion was confirmed when we saw one girl being dropped back off at her chair by a young gentleman.

Tomorrow we cross into France!

For a day with nothing planned, we sure did a lot…

Started with making breakfast (jamón, fried egg, and cheese on a croissant) and doing some laundry, and then we packed a picnic lunch while we dried our clothes in the sun and headed to the beach to enjoy the sun and our food. Half the people on the beach were naked, but it was way too cold for me (15°C!) to strip down today.

I spent a lot of time working on our plan for the next week, and I’ve got all of our riding and lodging planned until May 1, including our flight to Paris in a week and a half (the high speed train, the TGV, was twice the price of a flight!). For the next 10 days, we have 2 nights camping in people’s yards (Gamping.com), 1 WarmShowers, 2 nights at public campgrounds, 1 AirBNB, 1 hotel (free with points) in Paris, and 3 nights staying with friends near Marseilles.

We are both looking forward to the cycling-friendly town of Girona, where a lot of pro cyclists are known to live during their training season. I’m also looking forward to being in France, for the cheese, crepes, croissants, traditional French food, and the fact that I can understand the language! 

You can get anything made out of nougat here, and I picked up some nougat energy bars (aka candy) today as well as some nougat ice cream for dessert.

For dinner we did a tapas/pintxos crawl and filled ourselves with these amazing bites that are placed en masse on the bar in dozens of varieties; you just take whatever you want, and when you get the bill, the bartender counts up the number of sticks and charges you accordingly, €1,60 each in this case. The photos below don’t begin to do their deliciousness justice!

The ones above were garlic grilled cuttlefish, a delicious tapas.

Hasta mañana!

Okay, the word “gaudy” has only a coincidental relationship with Gaudí, but it’s a catchy blog title, and we spent the day in Barcelona exploring his works and a few other Barcelona landmarks.

It was an easy train trip on the R2 line from Sitges to Barcelona, and we decided that we prefer staying outside the major cities and will look for similar “trainable” stops from now on so we can avoid the stress and expense of the overly touristic city centers.

There is a big fútbol match today between Barcelona and Madrid, so the city had its share of fans wearing their team logos and breaking out into slightly inebriated fight songs on the streets, and the police had a huge presence, chasing away unauthorized sports memorabilia sellers on the sidewalks and patrolling the touristy areas.

We searched every corner of the Bocaria market for a food stall called El Quim that I heard was one of the best places to eat in Barcelona, but we couldn’t find it, so we settled on some croquetas and veggie wraps, which were actually quite good. We then had a great time people watching at a cafe on the Rambla, checked out the waterfront and cathedral and headed to La Sagrada Familia.

I wasn’t really prepared for this. I was expecting another touristy basilica, but maybe a bit more modern. I was really blown away with genuine awe when I stepped inside. I wonder if this is how people must have felt when visiting older basilicas when they were first built hundreds of years ago. I’m very glad we visited, though the audio guide wasn’t really necessary.

We then hopped on the train back to Sitges and picked up a baguette and made some homemade bocadillos, and are taking a power nap before maybe checking out a piano bar in town.

An update on our travel plans: since we spent more time than expected in Spain, we no longer have a lot of time left on our visa to visit Greece, so we are now thinking to adjust our route to move Greece (and maybe Turkey) to the fall, when the weather will be cooler, the tourists will be fewer, and our visas renewed. I haven’t figured out the exact plan yet, but it will give us more time to explore more of the Eastern European countries that aren’t in the Schengen visa zone, and possibly add Serbia and Ukraine to our country list.

After our last few days battling traffic on the N-340 highway, I was getting hell-bent on finding a route to Sitges with the absolute minimum amount of highway, even if that meant going off-road for parts of it.

So I took to Strava heatmap and planned a route as coastal as I possibly could, and it was a lot of fun! Lots of boardwalks, some through over-developed empty retirement/vacation areas, some through cuter coastal towns, plus some beautiful hiking trails through natural park land, a few hundred metres pushing our bikes through beach sand, some rocky outcroppings bordering the rail line (where we met a guy, 10km south of Sitges, who looked like he was on his way home after a too-long night of partying, dressed in his best club outfit that was just a bit ragged), and crawling through drainage ditches under the rail line to get to the road on the other side when our road ended, plus a few km of highways.

We ran into a couple who were coming to a finish of their two-year cycling tour through Europe and were on their way back to Switzerland. We exchanged some tips on gear and camping (curious about their lightweight folding chairs! We are getting tired of sitting on the ground when we camp), and swapped blogs – hey Martin & Barbara, safe travels!

For lunch we checked out a few restaurants along the water and were disappointed to find prices 5x what we are used to in the countryside, but when we cycled away from the water two blocks, Steve found a place for a tortilla bocadillo with a drink for a reasonable price.

We did have an ice cream on the coast though, and saw this helicopter come by, lower a man to the water, hover for a bit, and then haul him back and take off. Not quite sure if it was a training exercise or something else…

When one of our coastal paths ended in impassable brush next to someone’s mansion, we reluctantly got on the highway and found our way to Sitges, where we are chilling for three nights. We’ll take the train to Barcelona tomorrow, then enjoy a beach day Thursday, before continuing towards France!

Sitges is nice, but this part of Spain is super touristy. It’s comfortable to be able to speak English everywhere and have something besides Spanish food, but I’m missing my quieter countryside. However, we are going to go out and enjoy the nightlife at least one night before we get back on the bikes! It’s pretty quiet tonight (Tuesday), so perhaps Wednesday or Thursday…

My romantic vision of the bike ride from Valencia to Barcelona was of bike lanes through cute coastal towns, interspersed with sections through quiet rural farmland. The reality of the ride so far has been about 10% cute coastal towns with bike lanes filled with pedestrians and rollerbladers plus kilometer after kilometer of mind-numbing highway with constant traffic (nice wide shoulders though, so it’s quite safe). I think a lot of people are returning home from their Easter holiday today, so traffic was 10x what we’ve seen over the past week.

The highway riding and slight tailwind did increase our average speed quite a bit, and so we chose to push on and do our longest day today, a crazy and grumpy-inducing 152km, so that we have a shorter day tomorrow and more time to spend in Sitges. We are glad to be in our next rest stop, a hotel in the Catalunyan beach town of Capellans, a suburb of Tarragona. The hotel was cheaper than our patch of gravel last night, and we’ve got a kitchenette and patio and private bathroom to boot!

Woke up this morning to this little guy. Couldn’t get rid of him, he found his way back to the tent three times. I finally had to carry him to the next camping plot.

Going to find a bite to eat and rest our legs…

Happy Easter Sunday! We had a lovely 125km ride from Valencia towards Barcelona, and tonight we are camping along the beach. This Holy Week is getting very expensive; our spot of gravel at a beach side campground is 31€! Normally it’s 20€, and we are used to paying just 15€ or less… Quite ridiculous and makes me want to consider wild camping, even if it’s frowned upon… But the next cheapest indoor lodging I could find was over 50€, so not a lot of options. I think we’ll have to stretch our budget a bit from here until Croatia.

When we checked into the campground, the friendly host showed us to our space and asked us about our trip and where we are from. Hearing we are from America, the conversation of course turned to Donald Trump; he said we should have taken him with us to maybe help him change his mind about the world. It has been frustrating, to say the least, to have to apologise for being American everywhere we go. We haven’t met a single European who has anything kind to say about American politics. It’s quite an embarrassment, but as the camp host said, it’s not just the Americans; Hungary has the same problem, and I added that yes, Turkey, and perhaps France are having similar issues.

He then commented that, oh, of course you rode 125km today, you are American, you can do anything. In reality, we’d been passed today by a Frenchman on tour doing over 200km per day plus dozens of racers doing much more on their Sunday rides. Overall it’s disappointing, though understandable, the preconceptions that others have of us, simply based on where we were born. I think it’s an important lesson that the reality is always more complicated than what you first perceive.

We saw a lot of people out picnicking and enjoying their Easter, and we stopped at a busy port city for lunch, where I had the best shrimp I’ve ever had, sorry New Orleans, you are no longer #1. Gambás de Denia (a nearby town on the Mediterranean) tasted like little lobster tails, wow!!

Tomorrow we will ride as far as we can towards Sitges and find a (hopefully) more affordable campground or cheap hotel.

We spent another rest day in Valencia, taking in some of the things that were closed, including a big bag of pastries from the Central market, which we inhaled too quickly, the cathedral, the botanical gardens to see the resident kitties, horchata at Mercat de Cólon, and a nice dinner on Carrer del Comte d’Altea.

Yesterday I bought a 2.5 liter bike bag at Decathlon. It’s meant to go on your handlebars, but I wanted it on my front tube to replace my current bag, which is falling apart. The velcro straps were in the wrong place for that, so I got out my sewing kit and sewed on some new ones. I’m starting to feel like a tailor or something. It’s fun but time consuming…

Tomorrow we are headed towards Barcelona. Things are getting very expensive from here until we hit Italy, so we decided not to stay in Barcelona itself. Instead we will spend three nights in Sitges for half the price and take the train up to see the city. Three days of riding and two nights of camping until we reach Sitges…

Last night, we walked down to the Malvarossa area of Valencia to observe the Holy Thursday processions. The garments worn remind some Americans of the KKK, but they are not at all related. The rhythmic beating of the drums and quiet marching down the streets made for quite a sight.

We also got our hairs cut…

Today, we explored Valencia, mostly the Old Town area, but also some parks nearby. Of course, we saw the bull ring, train station with its stunning tilework, and had a horchata and fartons (which we inhaled before I took the photo).

I enjoyed some of the graffiti art in the area; some of it is quite elaborate.

It’s nice to take some time off the bikes, which are resting next to a wonderful city view for the day. I may have also found my next touring bike, what do you think?

For lunch, I found a pretty good arroz abanda (traditional seafood rice), and Steve had arroz al forno (oven baked rice with pork and sausage). Made some simple sandwiches and Valencia oranges for dinner, and probably off to bed early. We need to catch up on sleep!

I forgot my sunscreen today, so I got a little too much red in the face. As we were walking home, a Spaniard took one look at me and exclaimed, “Ole!” Okay, that’s enough embarrassment; I promise to keep re-applying all day from now on.

I forgot to mention that we’ve now entered a very popular cycling area. We are seeing lots of other cyclists on the road, mostly racing types and mountainbikes, but a few cycle tourists as well. It seems as popular for cycling as San Diego or San Francisco.

It’s kind of nice that the school kids and people on the side of the road pay us no attention, versus in the countryside where we got loads of stares.

That said, we still get plenty of looks, comments, and questions about the mirrors attached to our glasses and our solar panels. I’ve learned how to answer those questions in Spanish by now!

Short, very flat ride to Valencia today. Got here an hour early with a tailwind, so waiting for our AirBNB to be ready. Looking forward to a shower, decent lunch, laundry, and haircut today, and then Holy Thursday.