Fast Forward

After a few acclimation days in Barcelona, I met up with the Backroads tour guides who promptly loaded us up and drove us 2 ½ hours to Spain’s Cerdanya region. The scenery was really beautiful, but the journey was a bit unsettling as the magnitude of the mountainous terrain we’d be riding became apparent.  What have I done? I thought as our van labored up and up into a cloud bank which dropped big raindrops onto the windshield.

Eventually, we descended into the village of Pi (Catalan for pine) where we had a lovely lunch before suiting up for our first ride.  Luckily the sun broke through and we enjoyed a short but challenging ride to the town of Llívia – our home for two nights.    Weirdly, you have to cross the Spain/French border to reach Llívia which is small Spanish enclave surrounded by France.  After post-ride beers, we got settled into our hotel and then waited it out until Spanish dinner time, which is 8pm at the earliest.  We walked to a nearby restaurant where we had the first of what will be several spectacular dinners. 

 

 

Day one riding was a success, but I’m plenty worried about upcoming days.  When you sign up for a bike tour like this, they give you an idea of the daily mileage and elevation gain for the various routes. These looked more or less do-able at the time, although a few of the elevation gains gave me pause.  Still, elevation gains are expressed in total for a specific route so, for example, an elevation gain of 2500 feet might consist of five or more climbs that add up to that. In-between, there’d be downhill and flat terrain, so each climb  is not that big a deal by itself. But if that 2500 ft of climbing comes all at once well, then, that’s going to take some serious determination.

You can see where I’m going here. About a week before a tour begins – after your money has long since been paid – the tour company sends you the actual routes that you can view on RideWithGPS or a similar app. And yeah, you guessed it, these routes have long, long climbs vs. a bunch of rollers. Erp!  Stay tuned to see how it all turns out!