This fall's tour has been in the think tank ever since we completed our first visit to the Pyrenees three years ago: Girona to Bilbao 2014. We thought that was a wonderful tour, but we (I primarily) came away with a feeling of unfinished business. It was a difficult tour to plan because of some painful choices to make between major alternatives - in particular whether to primarily follow the French or the Spanish side of the range, but also how to finish off the western end. I went back and forth many times, modeling routes that followed the Basque coast against ones that stayed in the interior and visited parts of Aragon and Navarre.

In the end of course we mainly followed the French side of the mountains, taking in some of the great passes that feature in the Tour de France; and ended up along the spectacular Basque coast. It was glorious all the way, but I flew home fantasizing of a second pass along these mountains that followed some of the roads not traveled.

It seems a bit early to be returning to the same region only three years later - but when the senior member of the team is age seventy, we're pretty conscious of our narrowing window to fit tours like this through. There are a number of less challenging tours filed away in our dreambook, but we'll keep pushing them out as long as we can still ride through the mountains and return home smiling.

Here's what we've ended up with. Looking at it now, I see that it doesn't emphasize the mountains as much as I'd first envisioned. Different versions we tossed around took in more of the high passes and crossed into France and back again, but we've ended up with a pretty diverse, less mountainous itinerary. It really breaks down into three equally sized subtours - Northern Spain, the Pyrenees, and southern France. It looks wonderful.