Day 54 - Sant Llorenç to Castellar de N’Hug - Gorging in France ...Then Basquing in the Pyrenees - 2023

June 10, 2023

Day 54 - Sant Llorenç to Castellar de N’Hug

Ending on a High Note

As we foreshadowed in our last post, this is our last ‘big day’ and one of the few where we end with a big climb- ok I didn’t foreshadow, I explicitly stated it, but I wanted to use foreshadow in a sentence.

In reality, it wasn’t a really big day, 70 km’s, and the RWGPS route elevation profile of 1700 m + has some ‘tunnel’ effect, it was still a 70 km day with a solid 1500 m of climb and probably more impactful, a net ~500 m elevation gain … all at the end of the day.

That’s the ‘ending on a high note’ reference in today’s subtitle. We were pretty confident in the climb today, it was still a grunt but we’ve been doing this for a while now. Our biggest concern was the weather. The forecast was similar to the past few days … clear and sunny in the morning with clouds and rain showers in the afternoon. There was a significant difference in today’s forecast though. Rather than 30- 50 % chance of rain, and just a few mm’s, it was showing 80% chance at 3 pm with 2- 4 mm’s, and increasing from there.

We had incentive to keep moving and try to get this done and stay dry! This meant that I had to a) try to keep up with K on the hills and b) not stop every couple of hundred metres to take pictures.

There was success on all fronts. The morning riding was under glorious blue skies on our (semi) private roads. It is Saturday so there were a lot of roadies and an equal number of motor bikes for company. At noon when we stopped for a hydration break just past Berga, the clouds started to gather and we had a few spits of rain. This continued for the rest of the day, but no real rain fell on us even through the road was wet with puddles on a number of occasions.

Past Berga we had about 10 km’s of riding on the busy main highway, C-16, not great but this is all relative to the outstanding riding we’ve had for nearly this entire trip. After this short ‘busy’ section we turned off onto the B-402 -back to our ‘private roads’ to la Pobla de Lillet, and then onto our even more private BV-4301 for the final 11 km, and 550 m of climb! Through all of this we could see showers and hear thunder all around us, but we arrived in Castellar dry - from the outside at least.

Even though it’s Saturday in June, this place is still pretty quiet. A number of hotels/hotstal’s are closed ‘for holiday’. I can see that, in a few weeks when school is out I can see this place getting really busy so folks are taking this time off.

We’re staying at a nice but simple Hostal … and once again it appears to be the only place open in the village for dinner. That’s just as well as we weren’t going to venturing far as the forecast turned out to be pretty accurate. We arrived just after 3:30 and by 4:00 the rain was coming down, and it continued for most of the evening.

From here on in each successive day is net downhill to the Med. There will still be a lot of climbing, but we are just about through the Pyrennes now. We will be crossing over the ‘divide’ into France in a couple of days, and then back again into Spain … just because, but our experiences in the Pyrenees have been eye opening… and just great.

Heart

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SOTD - Tonight Will Be Fine, Teddy Thompson covering Leonard Cohen.

Yes, we outran the rain and completed the climb. We’re sitting in the mountains in front of a fire. Tonight will be fine.