Spirosbikespain: Glorious day in the rolling hills

Heading toward the coast, seems like you can't take a girl from Maine too far from the sea.

We went out for a quick breakfast as we planned to meet CESKO (Chris, Emma, Sam, KO) at the train station outside of town. They were going to ride there and we were going to take the train. But after breakfast we got an email, now Emma was sick. Probably has the same thing Chris had. We skyped with Chris and he sounded zonked; as he was probably up all nite with Emma. Cwiss!

We caught the train north and got off two stops out of town, the train station is on the outskirts of Bordils, it's absolutely deserted. One other family gets off, and we're left there all by ourselves. There's a beautiful road heading south into the farmland. Sooo nice.

We start riding, it's sunny, there are birds everywhere, no traffic. Heaven! Maybe that why the are all these churches around here. After about 8K we get on a road we had previously ridden, a gorgeous downhill to Monells. This time we curve around Monells and head further south. We're mostly just exploring.

We keep hitting these tiny towns and we find the center section with the church and take some pics and read about the church. These churches all date from about the 8th to the 12th century. And they've been added onto, expanded, sometimes there are cemeteries connected. We found one church that was dedicated to the beheading of Sant Joan something or other. Lots of killing going on here over the ages.

There's literally a church/castle/town about every 3-4 miles as the crow flies. It seems they would have put a bigger bet on one structure rather than so many smaller towns. But I guess they needed distributed access to the fields.

Speaking of which, all the farmers were out making hay today. The tractors were out cutting, some were picking up hay, the birds were everywhere picking at the exposed bugs. A real back to earth kind of day.

We stopped in Bisbal d'Emborda for lunch. This is one of the larger towns in this area. Interesting that there were lots of Muslims in the town.

Then we made our way over to Peratallada, where I had selected our hotel for the night. Remember April was loosening up the reins and I was selecting the hotels. Actually as I think more about this, I wasn't given complete authority, I was more like a trainee. I did a lot of research, narrowed it down to a few hotels, told April my preferred selection and then she sort of okayed it, with a combo look/tone that implied, "you better not screw up." haha.

We find the hotel and the guy claims to only have a superior room left for €130 but will give it to us for €100. I seemed to recall on some hotel review a supposed deal like this, only to have the hotel be essentially empty. So we go look at the room and it's quite nice, we take it. Turns out the hotel did seem full, there were only 8 rooms.

Showered, napped, had dinner. We split a pesto ravioli dish, I had fantastic grilled rabbit skewers with fries. April for some reason ordered a pseudo pizza - ham and figs and tomato sauce on the bread they have here. She didn't like her meal, so I had to eat some of it. Nothing new here. We had crepes for dessert. Vowed to stop eating so many desserts, then walked back to our hotel to sleep.

I forgot to use the iPad to take pics while riding today so no pics of the scenery. But I took some pics in our town of Peratallada. Incredible old stonework, alleyways, church, towers, moats, walls. Really a cool place. We heard it gets packed in the summer, but now there's no one around. In fact our innkeeper told us there are 18 restaurants in this tiny town. It's very cool to be here in the off season.

Pics...

Note the foundation of the building is the stone.