Me too

We sort of suspected this. The batteries are charged, the bikes and ours. A good sleep and a good breakfast for us and 100% charge for the bikes. We are ready!

You can count on it. Be forewarned though - it’s not flat - especially the steep climb away from the river as soon as you leave Mertola. Make sure your batteries are charged!

Excellent shot!

We are going to Serpa tomorrow. Who knows? maybe there will be 2 magical rides in a row.

Hurray for merino! Jacinto had a goal on tour of wearing his new long sleeve merino to ride in each day, but he didn't plan to wash it the entire trip. Oren said his goal was to stay upwind of Jacinto! In the end, he did have to wash the shirt, because it had so much salt from sweat that it was getting crusty.

Finally we are joining your route for a couple of days. We are detouring special into Mertola, the Andersons' were so taken with the town.

I wish we were riding some of your magical road, but we are not at all. We come in from Serpa, and then head out towards Alosno.

The batteries are the ones GRIN calls LiGo. We have six each. Each LiGo is 98 wH, making it legal for transport on the plane. At the destination we wire them together, yielding 600 wH. They live in a bag behind the seat. There is a little silver controller strapped to the seat post. Usually these are hidden and integrated in factory ebikes.

The bikes then have quite weak Bafang rear hub motors, torque sensing bottom bracket, and a nice colour Bafang display on the handlebar. The battery bags quite readily unstrap from the bikes, to come into a hotel room, unless the whole bike came in as well. Our chargers are just 2A, so we rely on having all night to charge in. One charger died early, causing a lot of inconvenience, but we had a replacement shipped out from Vancouver to Vilmoura, and it is working well right now.

I’m glad this day worked out for you. This and north in the Alentejo is my favorite region in Portugal, and I love Mertola.

We travel with off-bike clothing consisting of a couple of merino t-shirts, lightweight pants with lots of pockets, lightweight shorts (hiking style), plus a light sweater and light packabke down jacket (depending on season and altitude). We’ve never felt underdressed but we don’t eat at expensive restaurants. We bring trail runners or comfy sandals (Keens or Tevas) for walking, plus flip-flops for the beach or cold floors.

We have a double at home and most of the beds on recent trips have been bigger. I remember saggy narrow beds from our first European trip together in 1992, but I don’t know how much of that is due to a different time or our current better budget.

Remind me of your electric setup … do remember you used Grin but not which motor and batteries.

That certainly was an extreme day! But you made it! I hope today is easier on you.

The worst of the hills are now behind us, and we have a much shorter day planned so it should be easier from now on.

Thank you. It was not a planned marathon, but we did it!