Cycling in Catalunya Spain

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Hola from Castello d'Empuries in the Alt Emporda region of Catalonia. Just completed a 40 km loopthrough vineyards and medievel towns and am now enjoyinf a cerveza at the hotel Canet. Our bicycles are safely tucked away in the wine storage room of this hotel.

This is my first blog entry even though we have been in Spain for over ten days. This partly due to iffy wifi connections, lack of time, and too many other more pressing matters to attend to like eating the great local food and sampling the wonderful spanish wines.

Rather than bore you and me recounting every stop and route we have been on since we arrived, I will just touch on a few highlites so far.

First of all, they don't speak Spanish here, they speak catalunyan, vaguely similar to Spanish but I am finding I am better off trying English first. Almost all of the restaurants have multilingual menus, French, Spanish, English, German, and of course Catalunyan. The less populated the area the less likely we will be able to understand or be understood, but it doesn't seem to matter we are still manging quite nicely.

The only times we seem to get lost are when we pass through villages and cities on our way to another destination. We are trying to stay away from the main roads so you have to be vigilant about what signs you follow.

Our firtst 3 days were spent in Barcelona where we put together our bikes in two hours. It would have taken less time had I not been quenching my thirst with a few cervezas. We had to take a large taxi from the airport to handle the bike boxes which was no problem as there were many taxis to choose from. The taxis will charge you extra for lots of luggage so we ended up paying 45 Euros for a 20 minute journey to our apartment which was located in teh heart of the Eixample, walking distance to most attractions and lots of restaurants. We took the bikes for a dry run and did about 20 km in and around the city almost all of it on designated bike paths.Many stop lights that were largely ignored by the locals. We managed to get lost eventually because of the lack of rhyme or reason to the strreets in old Barcelona, but nevertheless made it back to the apartment safely.

It was a short ride with full panniers to the train station, again on designated bike paths and and it was a breeze getting our tickets and boarding the train for Girona. No charge fro the bikes and a place where you can hang them up and lock them. One hour later we were in Girona on our way to La Pedra Remenca our habitation for the next four days. It was about 25 km of easy cycling to the villa except for a lung busting final one km ascent (8 to 18% grade). But it was worth it. We had a two bedroom with basement house to ourselves with a beautiful view over a valley. It was selfcatering and the owners had done evewrything perfectly from the bedding to the kitchen to the wonderful outside dining area. The only problem was that the grocery store and anything else for that matter was back down that one km hill.

The cycling around the area was fantastic, lots of routes with very little traffic. Many pro cyclists including Lance Armstrong have and continue to train there. We saw roadies and mountain bikers in equal numbers. We discovered the viaverdes which are old train routes that have been converted to bike and walk paths. The biggest hill we did was about 4 km and averaged around 5%. the weather was grat except for one afternoon where we got caught in thunderstorms. The temp dropped fro 24 to 15 in about a half hour. Thankfully we were not far from our villa when it hit.

ALmost nine PM, time for dinner, adios for now. Len and Debbie

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