March 12, 2025
Autumn 2025: Spain
The plan we’ve ended up with for Spain really surprised me. My first thought was that we’d catch the ferry from Portsmouth to Santander again, until we fixed on the idea of a loop through Englandthat began and ended in London. Starting from there, it made more sense to fly to Spain, and has the advantage of giving us much more time flexibility than having to fit to the infrequent sailings.
My next thought was to fly to Santander and more or less reverse last year’s route - south through Extramadura, east from Almeria, and ending with a second pass through Mallorca, one we’d hopefully get more out of this time.
That’s not happening either though. Instead, we’re flying to Leon, forgoing a climb over the Cantabrian mountains that we’d face if we flew to Santander or the other possibility, Orvieto. From there we’ll more or less drop straight through the middle of the country, an option that surprised me by how reasonable the terrain is. Now that we’ve fixed on it I’m really excited about it. We’ll spend a fair amount of time in the wide open spaces of Castille and Leon, and then we’ll stitch together one landmark destination after another: Segovia, which we biked through in 1997; Madrid, from that same trip; Toledo, which we stayed at when we drove up to Madrid to get temporary passports after we lost ours near Granada; La Mancha; and Ubeda, Baeza and Jaen, three landmark cities we couldn’t see or really appreciate because of the lost passport fiasco. We’ll finish up by dropping through eastern Andalucia, end up in Malaga, and stare at the sea wondering what we should do next.
If we get to go to Spain, that is. A lot can happen in the half year between now and then.
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Some metrics:
- Travel days by train: 0
- Travel days by bicycle: 33
- Layover days: 57
- Travel miles: 850 miles
- Elevation gain: 38,000’
- Average travel day: 26 miles, 1,100’ elevation
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Would you still consider cycling Malaga to Majorca? Tomorrow we will go up out of Agua Amarga, in our underpowered Peugeot Hybrid, but still so much more horsepower than our little legs!
2 days ago
I’ll be publishing the itinerary for the Spanish chunk sometime in the next week, but I’m reworking it first. After following you along it convinced me that we have to stitch Cordoba and Granada in again.
Oh, and thanks for the £20 that arrived in the mail today! We’ll have a toast to the Grampies over an NA Guinness sometime this summer.
2 days ago
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