Day 52: Port d'Alcudia to lost at sea

April 10, 2025

The whole story. Read this if you have only read the interim post.

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The "Corsica Ferry" trip to France made it impossible to properly complete this day's post on the day, as is our custom. We did something temporary, but now (next day) I am telling the whole story, overwriting part of the previous temporary post. Here we go:

We decided to go for the idea of putting Shimano levers on the Magura brakes, based on the idea that the lever for the rear brake, at least, was leaking. So we contacted Joan, our guy at sort of strangely named "Mouteenbici" , in Sa Pobla. To the credit of the shop, they agreed to welcome us as soon as they would open, today. So once again we hopped on our bikes and joined the various peletons on the road out to the little town of Sa Pobla.

We arrived just at 10, and Joan ushered Dodie's bike into the workshop. Our plan was to walk into town for a look, but what to do with my bike? Joan pointed out that his own bike was parked just in the street, unlocked. But he could see that I was leery of leaving mine, with its bags. So mine got ushered inside as well.

We walked into the town, and when we get some internet, we can show what the place looked like. I kept trying to get a photo of the quaint streets, without a pile of parked cars in the way. Finally I did get some shots, and was happy. I also fired up Google Maps and found a bakery/coffee shop. Despite the giant buffet breakfast so recently, a coffee and pastry was a necessity. Both were really good, so I was happy again.

One we got coffee and pastry, we took a seat on a stone bench like the one in this photo. All the seats in coffee shop were taken.

After about an hour, we strolled back to the bike shop, and found not one but two mechanics hunched over Dodie's bike. To my great satisfaction, they not only let me watch, but the one that spoke English entertained my annoying questions, and comments. The new levers were in, but the action, especially with the rear, felt spongy. The fluid was new and the brakes had no air. The theory was that though the levers were now new, the hoses and the caliper cylinders remained old. Eventually, the whole system would need to be replaced. In the meantime, the mechanics were struggling to really clean the rims and pads, and to adjust the clearances as tight as possible. I found it a sort of gratifying to watch a real mechanic struggle with those clearances. It's not just me that has a problem with this - the design just sucks.

Dodie went on a test drive, and declared the front, at least, to be 10x stronger with the new lever. She now says she has confidence in the bike's stopping ability!

Dodie got new Shimano levers, on both sides.

I enjoyed watching the mechanic struggle with the difficult Magura brake cylinder adjustment, as I had often done.

This shot is a bit puzzling, as the mechanic in purple is flipping the lever for the front brake as mechanic two is looking at the rear.

They spent a really long time trying to get it right.

This is just one of two large rooms they had for bike repairs.

Almost all bikes for sale were light road bikes.

Dodie at the checkout, talking to a road biker from Denmark.

The biker from Denmark. His bike is feather light, costing 11,000 euros. He fell in love with the subtle colour. He also owns three other bikes.

If you look at the track above, you will see that Sa Pobla was south west of our hotel in Port d'Alcudia. And you will also see that the Albufera, where we went on the hot and mostly bird free death march the previous day, is also south (east). When the bike repair was done we boldly re-inserted ourselves at the end of the first leg of that (red on their map) route. Then bolstered by being on the bikes, we went around the remaining three legs. It was still kind of a stupid thing to do, because bikes or not there were not going to be any more visible birds. Somewhere around the end of Leg 3 we ran into some none too young British birders. I asked if they had really walked all the way from the beginning and they replied yes, they rather like walking. With our bikes, we left them behind, and I was thinking they are crazier than we are.

After we had rolled back around to the starting point for the four routes, at the visitor centre, we parked the bikes and set out on foot on the shorter ones, which incidentally had lots of hides. That's where finally we saw a fair number of birds, at the Albufera. Like these (just a sample):

A Common Tern landing in mostly Avocet territory.

He looks smug about it, but may be getting flak.

Some joker had also put this up for me to photograph!

There were also these butterflies. ID?

One of the non "death march" trails - shady!

And of course, Flamingos!

We found in the end, of course, that we had to slightly hustle over to the ferry for Sete. But on the way a man was about to cross at a crosswalk, so we naturally stopped. He looked at our Canadian flags, and urged us to go first. No, you; no, you resulted, but more than that, the man revealed that he was from Montreal (though originally from Munich), but had moved to Mallorca 30 years ago. Despite that, he kept his Canadian passport, and Canada remains first in his heart. We hung out at the crosswalk for a fair amount of time, as the man shared his Canadian reminiscences.

We showed up at the ferry, still in good time, and were guided to the boarding ramp by the pleasant young man shown below.

We joined these other two wheelers for boarding.

Ok, let's go for it. The boarding process had no crowds of cars and was really easy.

You could go out on deck, like this, but the boat was so tall that the height made me nervous.

We are leaving the port. The famous lighthouse on top of Cape Formentor was also visible, but I missed getting it in a photo.

We found that for a certain distance out to sea, if we sat in the first lounge pictured above, by a window, we could get mobile data. That allowed us to post a short blog entry, which has now been polished up, to be this one.

That lounge also had a cafeteria restaurant. We had determined not to eat anything on the trip, to ward off sea sickness. But it all looked so good, we went for it, though only sharing a single order. We got away with it, and had no tummy upset.

By morning, we were more or less smoothly ejected from the ship, resulting in today, the blog for which I will go and write right now!

Today's ride: 44 km (27 miles)
Total: 1,505 km (935 miles)

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