Since our bikes are stashed in Valencia, our next tour will start from there. We like the city a lot. There are bike lanes everywhere, plus the bike friendly Turia Park down the middle. There is the old centre, with the terrific market, and the City of Arts and Sciences - featuring the Oceanografic, with an aviary and a stream full of local and exotic water birds.  We love that stream, which gets us into such trouble with eBird - as we try to claim sightings of what they decry as escaped and/or exotic birds. 

This time, we do not actually plan to go to Oceanografic - where we have been twice before, but we will spend some time in the old centre.  And a main activity for us will be visiting the train station, to see if we can get our bikes on a carriage for Madrid, and thence to Plasencia. (Update: we did manage to buy the tickets from home!).

Plasencia? Yes, it's a town halfway up the Via de la Plata, about 400 km north of Sevilla. The Via de la Plata, or Silver Road, is a major north-south route in Spain. At 1000 total kms, it's the longest of the pilgrim ways to Santiago de Compostella. It was also a channel for the Moors moving north as they occupied the vacuum left by the departure of the Romans, around 700 a.d. and it was a channel for the Christians of the north, as they returned in the Reconquista, 800 years later, to give the Moors the boot. Now, with all this illustrious history, we are thinking it could host the famous Grampies.  The Grampies, of course, would not be the first cycle tourers through this way. In 2024 the even more famous Team Anderson, Scott and Rachael, from Seville ascended the Plata for a while, before veering east, to exit Spain at Santander. Their advice on the section to Plasencia has been invaluable. And Brent Irvine, best known for travels in Portugal, flew to Madrid and took the train to Merida, then up the Plata a bit before cycling back to Madrid. Brent is a good source of information about bikes on Spanish trains (or not!).

Plasencia to Seville is a mere 400 km. That may sound far in some circles, but it's only 8 days on a bike.  If we fly in to Valencia February 18, there are 51 days until the first ferry from Alcudia, to Sete in France. That's a lot of days to burn up, so what comes next?

To the southeast of Seville is Donana National Park, and the interesting sand street village of El Rocio on its border. There is a birding tours to Donana that we will  jump on. From El Rocio there a way to the coast, to the beach town of Mataslascanas.  That could have been fun, and some birding tours also leave from there, but our plan now bypasses this bit.

From Seville we have booked a tour to Gibraltar, which will be a good place to get rid of surplus British pounds we have been hanging on to since Grampies went to England and France in 2022. We thought about  a tour to Tangier in Morocco. A day or two would have been enough for us, just the time to sample a "real" tagine. But that one has not materialized.

Eventually, though, we will have to begin the trek back east, ultimately to France and Germany.  To escape from Spain there are always the Pyrenees to contend with. Rather than choosing a pass, or trying to sneak by on the coast, we got the idea of taking a ferry on the Mediterranean. It turns out that the ferries to France  leave from the island of Mallorca. So Mallorca jumped to a prominent place in our planning.  We had already thought of going there, but now it was a critical stepping stone on our route. 

The only thing about our ferry based escape plan is that the first ferry of the year leaves April 10.  So that puts a powerful waypoint into our planning. We can not leave Spain earlier than April 10, and we do not want to leave any later than April 10, if we are still to get to the other side of Germany before the Europeans throw us out.

 Getting to Mallorca will involve some of the more challenging cycling of the trip, if we would pass north of the Sierra Nevada.  Again, there are lots of cycle tourers to emulate for this routing: The Anderson's, of course, and our own Anne and Dave Mathers from Victoria, B.C., with their Springtime Spin in Southern Spain, especially the bit from Granada on east. Scott Anderson kindly worked up a route for us, and it looks like this:

So that's about 1000 km - which we might call 20 days. Add that to 8 days down from Plasencia, and  maybe 5 days in Valencia and taking trains west, gives 33 days. That gives oodles of time for checking out ancient cities, birding tours, and the like! But oh, oh, once we take that April 10 ferry from Mallorca to Sete, Sete to Leipzig is about 2000 km by the most direct route. So let's see,  40 days to do that and 51 days already spent playing in Spain and we are in trouble with Immigration! That means some definite train hopping once we get to France. Stay tuned for that plan in a subsequent post!