Author: Tim

It never warmed up above 10°C today, starting off in Avignon at a brisk 6°. But, we had massive tailwinds all the way to our destination near the Marseilles airport, where we are staying with friends for the weekend. Otherwise the ride was good, quiet country roads and wide shoulders most of the way. No touristy stops except for a cemetery where we heard some famous Frenchmen were buried. It was too cold for us to be in the mood for sightseeing though, so we pressed on and stopped at a cafe to warm up until our friends could meet us. It’s really good to see them again, as it’s been 4 years since they visited me last in San Diego.

To be honest, I’m so happy to be off the bike, and I don’t want to see it for a few days. We’ve decided that from here on, we will try to limit our riding to 80-100km/day and no more than 4 days in a row, so that we have time to see things and relax and not feel like we are doing nothing but riding.

After the weekend, we have four choices for how to continue towards Italy. If you have a recommendation, please give us a comment.

1. Ride coastal roads on the Cote d’Azur. Pros: lots of beautiful scenery, lots of places to camp and stop, some bike paths and boardwalks, warmer weather, touristy so it will be easy to find anything we might need. Cons: might be very busy traffic, some roads will be not really suitable for cycling, very hilly along the rugged coast with lots of traffic in places, more expensive, lots of tourist traps.
2. Ride through Luberon and Verdones regions. Pros: beautiful scenery, quiet and popular cycling routes, more laid back, less expensive. Cons: very mountainous so will be harder riding and take longer, somewhat cooler weather, fewer options for camping and lodging.
3. Ride through the countryside between the coast and Verdones. Not sure this is really a very interesting area or what the traffic will be like. Don’t see a lot of info about it, but it’s a more direct route with less hills.
4. Take the train to Antibes and continue riding from there. This would save us some time and get us away from the most developed parts of the coast, but it would mean probably taking our bikes apart to take them on the train, and we might miss out on some nice parts of France and reduce our time spent here.

We rode through many cute towns today, including Sommières, the start of a gorgeous 20km long dedicated bike path called Sommières Voie Verte, which wound through country, farms, small towns, and under Roman bridges.

We stopped in Nîmes to do a little sightseeing before making our way to Avignon.

The riding after the bike path was mixed between country roads and busy thruways. The French still win no awards for driving, having us white-knuckled on our handlebars as they skim by us. The quiet rural roads are nice except that every car is going 40kph over the speed limit and there’s no room to pass. The main roads are clogged with traffic (where is everyone going??), have no shoulder, and the cars refuse to slow down even with incoming traffic, giving us just one or two feet of space, well under the legal 4.5ft required and sign posted… I love everything else about France so far, but my fantasy of living here and riding my bike all over is fading quickly. Spanish drivers were 100x better, so courteous and patient. Maybe we just need to find the right area for cycling; we haven’t seen very many other cyclists.

We made up for it though with the food, which we splurged on a little today, since we haven’t had a proper French dinner. Wow, it was really incredible. Here’s some food porn…

Croissant aux aumonds

Quail egg casserole

Steak with foie gras sauce

Cod with buerre blanc sauce over quinoa

Chocolate cake

What a day with too many kilometers… Because of the rain forecast, we changed our plans last minute from camping at a vineyard in the country to an uber cheap crappy hostel in the middle of nowhere so that we could stay a bit more dry. Unfortunately that meant we had to ride an extra 25km, making today a bit of a chore. I don’t like the idea of grinding out distance on our bike tour, but with our flight and hotel in Paris already booked, we couldn’t take a rest day. Steve and I agreed to limit our rides to 100km from now on, ideally 80km (about 50 miles) per day.

That said, before the rain and traffic, we had a lovely day cycling through adorable towns and vineyards in the Languedoc region. We stopped at our first boulangerie for a croissant aux aumonds, and I think we are going to gain weight in France. Omg! I want one of those every morning!

We followed the uncompleted EuroVelo 8 for bits and pieces of the ride, but soon joined really busy highways leading to Montpelier.

Everyone warned us about the Portuguese drivers, but they were an absolute delight compared to the French, who had me yelling obscenities a dozen times today, for cutting me off, passing too close, honking at me, and various other rude and unsafe manuevers. For a country with the most well-known cycling race in the world, I was really disappointed with the horrible way the drivers treat cyclists, at least in this region… The other cyclists we met, however, were awesome; everyone said Bonjour, and a few greeted us with big smiles. And in a lot of places, especially close to Montpelier, we had dedicated bike paths that paralleled the highway.

Had a pizza for lunch at a really cute pizzeria in a tiny town, where the neighboring patrons heard my bad French and assumed I couldn’t understand them and wondered out loud whether we were German, Canadian, or Swiss (we have Swiss cycling caps, a gift from one of our WarmShowers guests). I didn’t have the heart to disappoint them and say we were American, although given that this region voted overwhelmingly for Marine Le Pen, maybe they like Donald Trump…

We unfortunately had no time to see Montpelier, aside from riding straight through the downtown area, along the rail lines, where we joined other cyclists dodging the commuter trains and slipping on the slick stone paving, wet with the fresh rain that had just begun to fall. We passed through an area that felt like New Orleans with some transplanted African Americans lamenting loudly (in English) about the difference of life here vs back home in the states, and some other kind of gritty but a little hipster urban neighborhoods.

Our lodging for the night is just barely one step above a campsite in the rain. It’s a hostel chain called Hotel F1, where we have to crawl over our bikes to get to the bed and sink, you don’t get any towels, soap, etc (I’m surprised we get sheets on the bed), and we have a bunk bed in the room, and the shared bathroom is not much more than a stinky hole in the ground with no toilet seat cover… But it was almost as cheap as camping, next to a discount supermarket where we got stuff for dinner, and sheltered from the crazy thunder and lightning and rain that’s going on outside our window…

We are going to hole up here until the rain stops, watching Les Marseillais, which seems to be the French version of Jersey Shores. Should be tomorrow morning sometime and then head towards Avignon. I was there last time on a cycling tour in 2003, and I hope it’s as cute and beautiful as I remember!

Followed the French election a little last night, as everyone in the campground was talking about it. What a crazy result! What is happening in this world??

Very flat coastal day of riding from Argeles-sur-Mer to Narbonne. We cycled through many beach towns, very quiet for the season, but beautiful, as well as lots of cycling paths that form the beginnings of France’s EuroVelo 8 route. It’s far from compete and we had lots of various surface, and it went from shared roads to dedicated paths many times. The final part of the day was through the Narbonnaise en Méditerranée Natural Regional Park, where we cycled for over 10km on narrow strips of land besides railroad tracks, with ocean on either side.

We saw a few other cycle tourists today and rode part of the way with a guy from Germany who was on the 9th month of his 1-year around-Europe tour, heading back to Germany. Even with 23kg of gear on his sturdy mountainbike (about twice the weight of what we have), he was beating us to the top of every climb. Amazing what that much time on the bike will do for your fitness.

We spent a lot of time in Narbonne looking around this adorable city and getting food for dinner at the market. There are some historic ruins from 118BC near the cathedral and a very scenic river running thru the center. The styles here are quite different from Spain, which is refreshing. While we were shopping across the street from the cathedral, a security guard came up to us and said something really fast in French. We smiled and I said, “désolé, je ne comprends pas”, and he said, “fermé!” Closed. But we had walked right in with the lights on and doors open and never saw any indication the shop was closing. He said we had to leave and couldn’t buy the things in our hands. We protested, and the cashier took pity on us and re-opened her register to check us out. On Monday everything is closed in France, but we were able to find a bakery and one other shop open to complete our shopping for our dinner.

Speaking of food, France is definitely quite a step up in terms of average quality of the food so far. And I’m so happy to have a choice of hundreds of cheeses in the market. Too bad we aren’t here for that many days. Here are some pics of our restaurant and supermarket meals and snacks…

Omg, the French make pâte out of everything. Pâte of speculoos cookies?? It’s like liquid crack frosting. Steve and I ate the whole jar in 24 hours. ?

Tomorrow is a long day and it’s supposed to rain later in the day so we plan to start as early as possible and we changed from camping to a hotel to stay dry in Montpelier.

À demain !

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…