A Big American Welcome
If you’ve seen the sterotypical American house and neighbourhoods in films then this was the site that greeted us when we arrived at our AirBnB. Our hosts Linda and Don went way above the requirements of any host from hiring a van to pick us and Tilly up in, to sharing their mealtimes and food with us. They laid on so much food in snacks drinks and fruit that we hardly made a dent in it! Don supplied tools and help for reassembling Tilly and they both spent hours chatting to us and educating us in everything from road safety to tips. They were nothing short of fantastic and a great...
Read MoreNerves and Fears
We tend to plan 4 or 5 trips for every 1 we actually do. We have a habit of changing our minds and being a bit like kids in a sweet shop and having too many places we want to go to! But planning is half the fun so we actually have twice the fun for half the tours! But, once we have actually planned it and bought the tickets our excitement tends to evaporate. We start to get cold feet think we can’t do the trip and this year, events have conspired to make us think Linda’s friend “fate” didn’t want us to go on a tour at all! I broke a tooth, the toilet and water...
Read MoreWeeeeeeeeeeee
It may have taken us weeks to get up the mountains but it only takes an hour to come down! Our morning climb up to the last pass was fortunately in the cool and by the time we reached the top we’d been passed by numerous members of the lycra or leather brigades (racing cyclists or motorbikers) all giving us the thumbs up. The road down was fantastic, numerous tight bends, sheer drops, broken crash barriers and a decline that made our brakes earn their keep, I loved it and Linda hated it! She doesn’t like sheer drops, so we spent half the descent on the wrong side of the road too...
Read MorePilgrims Progress
The Camino De Santiago de Compostela is one of the most popular pilgrim routes in the Christian world. It starts all over Europe in various places and is marked by a yellow sea shell symbol. We’d cycled some of the southern Spain route northward toward Santiago de Compostela earlier in the trip, but at Burgos we joined the main route that starts near the French border and heads West. Naturally this puts the price of everything up and makes accommodation harder to find and makes everywhere much much busier. We were heading the wrong way along the route as we began our climb into the...
Read MorePlain sailing
It’s very odd to be cycling in a relatively flat landscape surrounded by corn fields in bright sunshine yet be at around 800m. As you climbed up to the Plains (albeit in a taxi for some of it) you just don’t expect to get to somewhere flat at the top. It’s like a rolling Lincolnshire or the Canadian prairies with almost all the landscape being farm on top of the alps. It’s actually a bit dull, but it does mean when there’s a wind behind you you fly along – easily doing more than 20km each hour on some occasions, which for a fully loaded tandem isn’t...
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