It's always hard to write up this part of the journal.

Now at home and stuck back into our 'other life', reviewing the last few months and distilling them down into something succinct and concrete is tough. But is has to be done, so here it goes.

We’ve all heard the phase ‘I stopped in my tracks’, and we’ve all probably used it metaphorically in describing some part of our tours. I know I have.

This tour was different though. On countless occasions we literally stopped in our tracks, which was usually the middle of the road we were on, slack jawed, and just soaked in the moment. 

The variety, beauty, grandeur, and often the solitude of the places we cycled through was beyond compare.

Travelling through Europe, and other parts of the world, is not a new thing for us, and we are very grateful for the good fortune and luck that has afforded us that opportunity, but this trip had such a different feel to it than any other we’ve done. It was the natural environment, at times augmented, but not overridden, by human elements, that set the tone for the entire trip.

We had the great cities and medieval towns, the outstanding restaurants and the simply perfect coffee and croissant looking over an azure sea, but these were just the gilding on the lily. For those of you who’ve already toured where we went, I think you know what I mean. For those who haven’t, any of the regions we went through should feature highly in your future tour plans.

They were spectacular.

The Route

Brilliant.

There was only one day that we wouldn't want to do again and that was the last day from Blanes to Mataro. It wasn't bad, it was just not worth doing again, in stark contrast to the other 48 days of riding we had. To be fair, once we were in Mataro we had one of the best meals of the trip, so we'll call that day even!

The route was brilliant largely because of the work and efforts of those who went before us. We essentially just 'crowd sourced' the route.

This was the first time we've put together a daily route for the entire tour. If you've read along you'll know that we liberally copied routes and specific gps tracks from a host of other Cycle Blazers so the process of creating a daily route was very easy.

We will certainly do this for future trips as it gave us a really good structure for the tour. Having a defined daily route didn't mean that we slavishly stuck to it though. We often changed the route on the fly or in a few cases, changed it completely and went somewhere else. However, the rigour of having a detailed plan to start with took a big underlying stress factor out of the whole tour.

So I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks. This was something new for us and it's something we'll stick with.

We'll also use the 'copy and paste' / K-tel Greatest Hits method for overall touring planning as well. The reality is that we will very likely be touring in areas that many other Blazers have already been. When we see something great that someone else has already done we won't try and reinvent the wheel. A RWGPS file export with a few tweaks if necessary will work just fine. We will inevitably have days where we make our own routes as part of the overall tour, and hopefully they will be good enough to inspire others to copy them too;)

This tour was, in general, well off of the 'major touring routes' and was 90% or more on small roads as opposed to dedicated bike routes / infrastructure. For Southern France and Spain this proved to be ideal as these 'small' roads were almost always completely devoid of motor vehicles. Once again, these types of roads will be a key feature of future tours. Dedicated bike routes are great, but not always necessary for a great and safe tour.

Another brilliant new feature (for us!) was the incorporation of a couple of 'hub & spoke' sections, Pont en Royans, Rocamadour and Girona in particular. Doing this allowed some fantastic unloaded rides through some amazing terrain. These will definitely be a feature, perhaps the defining one, for future trips.

It may be a function of getting older (we think that it's also part of getting wiser) that this tour was consciously planned for shorter days with less saddle time, on average, than our previous tours. There will be more on this in the 'Numbers' post that follows, but we did go into this knowing that we would have a lot more climbing than previous tours and that we wanted to have the time and the energy to enjoy each day, and we did. This also is a nod to the experience of other CB’ers whose tracks we were following that kept our … correction,  my …. hubris in check. It’s not only ok, but wise to have 50-60 km days in the Pyrenees.

The Gear

Camping Stuff

Poor Agnes and her Feather Friend.

We paved a good portion of the road to Hell  when it came to camping.

The four nights we did camp were wonderful, bar the exploded x-ped sleeping mat  on night 4 (it was 12 years old!), but 4 out of 72 is not a sustainable ratio. For the third long European trip in a row, Agnes and all her accompanying camping friends (sleeping bag, mats, pots and stove) were sent back home. At least we’re getting good at sorting out the mail systems and we continue to be pleasantly surprised at how reasonable the cost is to mail packages back to Canada. The takeaway from this though is not that it’s easy and relatively inexpensive to mail stuff home, it’s that we should not bring the stuff in the first place.

Yes, this trip confirmed  that we are now credit card tourers. This has knock on ramifications on the rest of the gear as well. First, the amount of bike clothing we take along. We had three sets of bike shorts & tops, and with regular camping we would continue with this. Cut out the camping though and two sets is enough, and this follows through to off-bike clothes as well. Future trips will be lighter

Electronics

We each had an iPhone and a tablet. For K it was her Samsung 7” plus a Kobo reader and she found the Samsung to be redundant. For me it was an iPad Pro 11” with an Apple Magic Keyboard. This was brilliant and was our main tool for planning, reading and photo management. 

Regarding photos, we both used our phones for ‘snap shots’ and they are quite good, but I also brought along my Olympus OMD-E5 camera with four lenses. This camera is about half the size of a DSLR and has probably 90% (or more) of the picture quality. I’m very happy with it and it will continue to come along on trips. However I will only bring two lenses, a 24-300 mm (eq) zoom (the standard lens) and a 35 mm (eq) f1.8 lens for low light situations. I used both of these regularly and the 35 mm lens is quite small. I had two other lenses (150 - 600 mm eq zoom and 90 mm eq f1.8) that rarely got used (about as much as Agnes) and they will stay home next time.

Three additional indispensable electronic items were our 21800 mVa power bank batteries, our Garmin Forerunner watches and our e-sims. The batteries gave each of us about three days of recharging our phones and Garmin watches (and we were never more than a day away from being able to recharge the batteries) so we were able to keep our  phones and Garmins  charged at all times.

As for the Garmin watches, these were a new item and proved to be very useful. We use our phones for navigation (RWGPS GPS route exported to our Pocket Earth app on our iPhones which we then just follow along like a hard copy map) so the Garmin watch is just used for recording our ride. It synchs automatically with the Garmin Connect Apps on our phones when we stop for the day, and then Garmin Connect synchs automatically with RWGPS if you have an internet connection (meaning a phone signal with your iPhone data). By the time I would sit down to write up the journal, the RWGPS map of the day's actual ride would be uploaded and patiently waiting for me. It was like magic!

And then there were our e-sims. This was the fourth time we’ve used e-sims while  travelling and the first time we used them for more than three weeks. For us they are a game changer and I can never imagine purchasing a physical SIM card from a live person again. 

We purchased the Orange Holiday Europe card which gave us a French phone number (very very useful) with unlimited calls within the EU, 3000 texts, 4 hrs of international calls and 20 GB of 4G data for 30 days. Once you registered your account, which was very simple, you could recharge your account for up to another 30 days at a time (or less if you didn’t need that long) and the account and phone number stayed active for six months, meaning you could do multiple recharges, which we did. It was easy, seamless and it worked 100% of the time, in France and Spain. Orange's coverage may be less in other countries, but for us it was perfect. And all of this was set up before we left Canada.

Ironically, we had excellent WiFi at many of the hotels we stayed at, which was unusual based on our historical experience in Europe, and we really didn’t need it given the amount of data we had on our fast iPhone plans (and we always had a 4 g signal where ever we were).

The Bikes

Our Tout Terrains are more or less indestructible, supremely comfortable and as reliable as a Labrador retriever. I did a hub oil change (Rohloff hubs with belt drive) and a brake inspection (the pads were new last fall) before we left and that was more or less it for the bikes.

One flat tire, and we were running very light, quiet and quick Marathon Supremes (26 x 2"), and it was a slow leak that we discovered in the morning before we set off. Other than that flat, the only thing we discovered mechanically about the bikes is that Shimano XT brake pads last for about 39,500 m of downhill braking.

Both our brakes (front and back) were feeling like they were needing replacement for the last week of the trip but we were mainly cruising along the coast with no really big hills. In the spirit of Latin culture, .... mañana.

On the last day when we were about 8 km's from Mataro, K's front brake was making a lot of racket. When we checked it out, the rotor was a little bit warped, but not too badly, but the brake pads were worn down to nothing and the brake pistons were almost fully extended! Oops, should've replaced these a few weeks ago. We do carry spare brake pads, and it's easy to  do if you replace them before they are fully worn. When they're at the state K's were (her front at least) it's a bit more involved and requires levering the brake pistons back, ideally with a brake block which we also had. Rather than do a roadside replacement, K laboured on with a squeaky bike for the final 8 k's and tried to look like nothing was wrong with her bike as folks shot her dirty looks for having such a noisy bike! The pads were replaced in the comfort of our garage once we were back home.

This is getting pretty long winded for one post, so our 'Top Fives' will come next in a separate post.