Category: Spain

A quick update before I forget everything and while I have Internet access…

I rode out of Madrid on a Sunday morning which was nice as the traffic was light. The most memorable thing was getting lost in a shanty town on the southeast outskirts of the city and then a new development which was not well marked on my map. But thanks to another bicyclist I found my way around the freeways and train tracks.

The first night I slept at a fancy and busy campground in Aranjuez. Felt like the KOA of Spanish camping.

Then I had a lovely day of riding in La Mancha: flat, sunny, light tail wind. Followed by a dreadful day of riding in La Mancha: gradual climb, cold and foggy, headwind.

The next day I finally broke out of the fog in the late morning, went up and over the edge of the plateau and down into the hilly, endless olive groves of Andalucia. This is the part where any half-respectable town seems to be built on the top of a hill and only approachable via switchbacks. But the riding has been decent and the views spectacular. I’ve spent the last two days riding through olive groves which run out to the horizon in all directions. It’s harvest time so I’ve also run into traffic jams of tractors and Land Rovers full of olives and field workers respectively. Stealth-camped one night in an olive grove without incident. Especially as I made sure to get up early to avoid any surprise visits from the harvest crews.

I’ve now made it to Puente Genil and face another range of mountains before I get to the coast at Algeciras.

 

 

 

I had intended to head southwest from Logroño straight over the next set of mountain ranges, but my cold night up at Urbassa made me think twice about that. Instead I headed west around the range toward Burgos.

The route took me through what is apparently prime grape-growing terrain as I found enormous vineyards and the occasional imposing structure of a large bodega. These often had large parking lots and I presume that when the weather is right winery tours must be a significant activity in the region. But although the sun was out, the weather was again cold and I saw relatively few wine tourists.

The land at first reminded me a great deal of California, with fairly dry vegetation between mountain ranges. But gradually the terrain sloped up to a high exposed plateau cut through every few miles by river valleys. The cycling was not particularly fast since in the plateau sections I faced a brisk headwind and each river valley involved a steady climb to get back out the other side.

I spent a night at an inexpensive hotel (seems they’re often called hostals) in Briviesca then rode on to Burgos the next day where I enjoyed a dorm room to myself at the local campground. I had planned to sleep in my tent, but it looked like another cold night. I took a quick look around Burgos in the morning and then rode over more beautiful high plateau to Aranda de Duero where I found a room in another hostal above a restaurant.

At Aranda I had to decide whether to go back east around the Sierra de Guadarrama or head southwest to go over the pass from Segovia. I decided to take the more direct route via Segovia. However I wasn’t keen to spend a night in the cold mountains again, nor was the traffic getting into Madrid appealing. So I chose to adulterate the “bike tour” part of my trip by catching the commuter train from Segovia into Madrid.

If I were a purist about biking, catching the train would not be an option, but this trip is not about setting records or proving anything. Not that I can quite put into words what it is about, but catching the train over the pass and into the city seemed consonant with the overall feeling of exploring the world by bike.

Segovia is another beautiful, fairy-tale city with a great cathedral, winding narrow streets, ancient walls, and an enormous aqueduct reaching into the old town. I was very tempted to spend a few nights there, but decided to keep moving since I was planning to take a few days off in Madrid.

For others considering mixing bike and train travel in Spain, getting a bike on the Cercanias commuter train is a simple question of finding a space for it and pushing it on — no extra charge. There were very few passengers out of Segovia, so this was simple. However, arriving in downtown Madrid was a very different question. Upon entering the city, the train goes underground and starts to feel more like a subway: crowds of people getting on and off during short station stops. If I were to do the trip again I would have gotten off the train in the outskirts of the city. Instead I took it all the way to the central station of Atocha. I then had to wrestle my fully loaded bike out of the train as a crowd of people tried to push their way on before the doors closed. Once off the train the only way I could find to get out was via an escalator. There must have been elevators somewhere, but I didn’t find them. Another passenger offered to help me hold my bike on the escalator and up we went. Then I found that my ticket from Segovia, while valid, would not open the turnstile doors to get out. Again, my fellow passenger came to my assistance, using his ticket to open the turnstile, then holding it open as we squeezed both of ourselves and the bike through.

Once out of the train station, finding my way was straightforward although Madrid seems to have none of the bike-friendly amenities of the northern Spanish towns.

My stay in Madrid has been wonderful. I’ve stayed with Bradley, a cellist with the Madrid orchestra, his wife Pilar, a nurse, and their son Sebastian, who’s studying nuclear engineering. Bradley took me to the Prado museum where we saw an astounding number of great paintings and an acquaintance of his snuck us into the Hermitage special exhibit. I also happened to arrive in town with excellent timing since Bradley was able to get me a ticket to the dress rehearsal of the Madrid Opera‘s production of Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District by Shostokovich.

Now that I’ve spent a wonderful few days here enjoying the city and friends and overdosing on art, it’s about time to continue. I’ve sketched out a route to Algeciras and will start biking again tomorrow morning (Sunday).

 

 

I’m running quite a bit behind on these blog posts, so forgive me if I skim the surface for a bit. After breakfast with Ingrid and Jon I packed up my much cleaner than usual clothes and bundled myself off to the Urrugne post office where I mailed all my France maps back to Portland. I can’t bear to get rid of them, but don’t want to be biking about with an extra few pounds of paper in my panniers.

I was somewhat disappointed with the border crossing into Spain. I had hoped to at least get a photo of a sign saying “Bienvenidos a España” or something, but no. I simply rode across a river and found that the street signs, instead of being in Basque and French, were now in Basque and Spanish. So you’ll have to take my word for it that I crossed the border. There’s no photographic evidence.

Jon had told me the night before that there was a great deal of manufacturing industry in the Basque region of Spain and I soon confirmed this. I rode through small industrial towns, past factories and warehouses. These soon morphed into the industrial suburbs and the working port of San Sebastian. Traffic turned heavy as I entered the city. I stumbled across a bike route, but was only able to follow its disjointed track thanks to another cyclist I met who — noticing my perplexed state — offered to guide me into the center of town.

The center and old-town of San Sebastian (Donostia in Basque) is a beautiful, busy place, set alongside two bays lined with beaches. I decided to stay two nights in a relatively inexpensive hotel near the center and spend a day looking around. I’m told San Sebastian has some of the best restaurants around, but unfortunately I struggled with the Spanish eating schedule. The big meal of the day is in the early afternoon, then supper is a lighter affair usually around nine or later in the evening. For a hungry bike tourist, finding that most restaurants would not serve supper prior to 8:30 was frustrating.

I took part of my day off to pick up more maps of Spain and started plotting out my route to Madrid. The next morning I headed out southwest. Unfortunately in my effort to avoid traffic I seemed to pick the steepest possible route out of town. But after an hour or so I found myself on more manageable roads and headed off on a gradual climb up the coastal range via Tolosa.

The landscape was beautiful, rolling hills and mountainsides covered with green pasture land and forest, interrupted by the occasional industrial town or cluster of factories.

Considering that this was my first real climb on the fully loaded bike, I was pretty happy with my progress. Although it got steep as I approached the top of the first range just past Zegama. The top was 650 meters above sea level after which I had a nice ride down to Alsasua. However, the day was getting late and I had hoped to ride on to Urbassa park to camp for the night. By the map this looked like a short ride of perhaps ten miles, but the short ride switchbacks directly up the face of a long escarpment to something over 900 meters. Looking up at the mountain I realized that if I continued I would be doing the second half of the climb in the dark. Luckily as I was looking for other accommodation options I met Ada. I asked her if she knew where I might pitch a tent for the night and she generously suggested her backyard in a town about 3 miles away.

I gratefully accepted her offer and rode off to meet her at her house where I soon met her husband Luis and their sons Yakob and Isaac. Not only did they let me pitch a tent in the back, but offered me a shower, dinner and breakfast as well.

Ada is from the Netherlands and speaks English (as well as Dutch and Spanish) and Luis is from Spain. Their sons go to a Basque school. Another multi-lingual household that left me embarrassed at my reliance on English and a bit of bad French. However we all communicated and the time there was great. The house was a new construction of their own in which the interior and exterior parts of the walls are almost completely separate, providing remarkable insulation such that they can heat the whole building with a single wood stove. Some day I’ll need to go back and play Magic with Yakob. We didn’t have time for it during my brief visit.

The next day made the climb up to Urbassa park under beautiful clear skies. I reached my previous nights intended campsite by mid-morning, and since the weather was so good set up camp and lounged in the sun for the day. With the altitude came a bitterly cold night however and I woke to a tent covered in frost.

I brushed off the frost I could and packed up early then started riding after a cup of coffee at the campground restaurant. The ride was generally flat along the Urbassa plateau, then dropped off down a south escarpment as dramatically steep as the one I’d come up the day before. I rode on that day to Logroño where I managed to convince a campground manager to let me spend the night although the tent sites were closed for the season.