Finally on the road! Got up kind of early and April wanted to get a few miles in before breakfast. We often do this as it builds up our appetite, especially here where we eat so late we're sometimes even full when we wake up. So we found the greenway south out of Girona. The greenway is a dirt path, sometimes a converted railway bed; April loves them and I'm mixed. No traffic, but they really slow you down. Our bikes and tires are designed to handle dirt, yet they're still very good road tires.
We stop about 10k out of town, find a bar that has coffee and breakfast, I manage to ask for an omelette with ham and cheese. Nice.
Then we continue on the greenway which is very well marked here. Little bike signs which also have mileage on them. Great system. We get into the farmland, and can see the road in the distance and the road cyclists moving pretty fast, while we're meandering along. Sigh, April loves this stuff.
Finally at llagostera we have to get on the paved road. It feels so fast and easy. From here we head south and east over some hills to the coast. We get moving along at a good clip then hit the hills. This section is ~16K, we're not sure if its mostly up, up and down, whatever. I have to shift down to my smaller sprocket up front for the first time, and my front derallieur won't shift onto the smaller sprocket. WTF? We stop, I adjust the screws, it still won't shift down. I adjust my crank, maybe I tightened it down too much? No it's fine. Finally I determine the derallieur must have been bent a little during transport. This sucks. But I sort of bend it back and then it works.
So back up the hill, wasn't too bad, the weight makes a huge difference but we keep it in low gear. Lots of cyclists passing in the other direction. It's great to see all the riders. Clearly a big biking culture. So it turns out we crest the hill at about 6-8K and then it's rolling and even more downhill to the coast. Freakin awesome! We were thrilled cruising down the down hill. Passed some German bike tourists climbing up, they got the shitty end of the stick!
Finally we pull in to Tossa de Mar, our beach town for the night. April has us in a tiny inn right on water at the end of the beach. It's fantastic, we get a little room that looks right out on the beach. Great showers. We're early enough for lunch, they eat late here, maybe 2:00. We get on the Internet, check out yelp and tripadvisor and find a good place for lunch. Sure enough the lunch place was awesome, we had this buratta cheese appetizer that was amazing. Then we had a pizza and a dried tomato pesto pasta dish. All superb. Nice wine. Perfect lead in to a nap. From our lunch spot we can down the gorgeous beach we can see hotel at the end and this really cool castle right on a point and hill next to out hotel. The sun is shining, light breeze, I say hopefully, "let's hit the beach and chill, maybe a quick nap?" April says, "well I think we should explore the castle." Damn it! I knew it. In fact I'm wondering if I'm ever gonna get to relax on the beach.
So we get to walk across the beach, then slog up all those steps up to the old fort/castle. Yes it's cool. The view up and down the coast is amazing. There are a number of these medieval forts all along the Costa Brava. Lots of fighting all along here over the past 2-3000 years. The Greeks, the Romans, the Moors, the French vs the Catalans, Hannibal, etc.
We finally get back to the hotel like at 5:00. Out for dinner close by, nothing special, except for some drunk Russians, who were arguing with the waiter about soccer stars. Pele vs Messi vs Zidane.
One more thing, it turns out we're slightly ahead of the tourist season, in fact a number places are closed weekdays. But it's great for us, enough places are open, and there are very few tourists and cars. You can see that it will be a zoo here in the summer. But right now it's fantastic. And it will allow us to wander in to a town and always find a place to stay and no places are full. Pretty sweet.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
No comments:
Post a Comment