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Published: December 3rd 2023
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Gravel roads in Portugal, nah, not me I prefer a nice smooth tarmac road with many corners, no way.
Wait, did you say Portugal and gravel for wimps?
Ok I'm in not so much for the gravel but the sun and some Douro wine will do nicely
A friend told me to take my smallest bike as my behemoth BMW would make it into more of a chore than fun and he also lied to me and said it would be fun.
So the small bike is more a home for sundry spiders in my garage, obviously it's great fun for spiders to weave their nets on motorbikes.
So I took it from the garage and got some service done and with a new battery is started and ran alright.
The company that arranged this, takes your bike down to Portugal with lots of other bikes.
A lot of other bikes, am I going with other people. My dear wife was deeply shocked, tens of thousands of kilometers all alone and happy with that
and I'm going to ride with a lot of people that I don't know, yikes!
Southern Portugal is
infested with people who escape from their countries as the days grow shorter, just like what they do in Spain.
An early flight, 6 am a departure that got me out of bed at 3 am, a dark and misty morning.
Many a golf bag at the check in.
Some confusion later ,at the airport, saw me somewhere close to Faro, due to a late night and an early rise my brain was more mushy than normally.
So no bike for me, I set forth on the back streets for some lunch and a walkabout to enjoy all the big hotels and apartment blocks.
I enjoyed reading a bit and the my room mate, Bjarne, walked in, we had two rooms and a shared bath.
A very crummy buffet dinner later i was fast asleep.
An early breakfast and some splitting up of the herd, the hardcore with tricked out bikes, the medium well done with their bikes, and then the soft core and me..
The sun shone and off we went off the nice smooth tarmac into the rough.
When I ride in groups I try to be the last,
20231112_102115
Dressed for sucess then you can ride at your pace and not ruin some speed fiends day.
And that was basically what I did for four days, and gravel roads, my arse, more like enduro, I never crashed, slow and safe.
Orange groves galore and little farms up in the hills, sheep on the roads(?) Nice nature and not burned to a crisp from the sun,
Some parts had som bush fires that had burned out, some streams and a great big dam, I do't think we did more than a thousand km in a week.
My roomie and absconded on Wednesday and went to Cape Vincent, the either southernmost or westernmost pace in Europe, who cares, tarmac all the way and smooth at that., southernmost, I forgot Ireland.
Well back at the hotel there were some unhappy campers, the days ride was not up to expectations.
Well ours was so there is that,
Communal dinners in restaurants built totally out of concrete is not a haven for conversation as everyone wants to tell about their day and have to shout to be heard.
So most nights, not that were many, my roomie and I
went out on our own.
So; eat, sleep, ride, for the hardcore and the medium well dones the rides had to be discussed ad nauseam.
Bjarne and i could not give a tinkers cuss, a nice coffee break now and then and just enjoy the ride, the skies were blue and the sun was shining, what more can you ask.
The last day, some sand, I hate sand and mud with a vengeance a water crossing and some more gravel.
Bjarne and I wanted to ride up to some village or other on tarmac and our esteemed guide wailed and asked us to stay in the group pretty please.
Some hardcore guys had taken a beating and had joined us, hardcore must take it's toll.
Anyway we went on tarmac up into the hills for lunch, some road side restaurant or other with a waiter/ owner the size of a garden gnome took us to our table
and asked if we could speak French, I raised my hand and got a smattering back, Sanglier, in common tongue, wild boar.
Sanglier is a word I learned reading Asterix in French, a very common
diner for Asterix's mate Obelix.
We got an enormous amount of meat and chips and it was quite nice.
Time to get back and our guides want us to take some gravel and we all went noooooo.
So we had a lovely tarmac ride with lots of curves going back, all in all a nice day.
A noisy fare the well dinner later bed time and also time to go home.
All in all it was a nice trip, nice people good weather, will I join a group ride again, no.
But I will dedicate a trip to the Iberian peninsula at my earliest convenience.
One of the slowest check ins and safety controls in the western hemisphere later + 4 hours got me safely on the ground in Gothenburg where the weather was crap.
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