Monday, 19 August, 2024 – Saturday, 31 August, 2024
On Monday, the 56th day of our journey, we left France and entered Spain. In the last couple of kilometers before the border, we were met with a couple of hills with an overlook on the main road underneath us. We saw that the line of cars was starting to form on the road below, and therefore, a lot more cars decided to go on the same road as we did. All the way to the top, cars were overtaking us, even when that wasn’t the best idea because of the narrow road. But when this hilly road joined back on the main road, all those cars had to patiently wait in line for someone to let them in. Luckily for us, we didn’t have that problem and could easily join on the main road. And because of the slow traffic, we were able to drive along with the cars, sometimes even overtaking them when the line was moving extremely slowly.
And why did this line form? We thought that border checking was taking this long, so we got our passports out of the bags before we needed them. Well, it turned out that the border had nothing to do with the long lines. The problem was the village of Le Perthus before the border, which was crowded with people (who walked over the road without looking) and cars (they looked as if they were trying to park without the necessary skills). Again, we were able to avoid the wait by simply riding between the cars. Small reward for cycling this far 🙂
When we arrived at the border crossing, nobody was there, so we didn’t need our passports. We took some pictures next to the “Espana” sign and even got some thumbs-up from the passing cars when they saw us smiling. From there on, we were hit by a cultural shock. In the first 10 kilometers, we saw a few women by the road, barely dressed, just waiting. When a random car drove up to one of them, talked to the woman, and picked her up, we figured out what was happening. Apparently, as we learned later, prostitution in Spain isn’t forbidden, and these women were there mostly for the truck drivers to pick them up. As we got deeper into Spain, this stopped, and we didn’t see any of them again. In the evening, we spend an hour learning Spanish, waiting for the dark. Since Spain doesn’t tolerate any wild camping, we made sure to be more careful and hid better.
On the next day (day 57, Tuesday), we did a bit over 25 kilometers to Medinya, where we had breakfast next to the water fountain. Later, we also had lunch and dinner there. In the evening, we just moved in front of the nearby cemetery, where we slept in the tent. Our initial plan was to sleep by the forest next to the cemetery, but when we saw a bunch of small wild boars there, we changed our mind. We still preferred cops over nosy mama boar.
The night was deadly calm, but we didn’t want to risk it, so we got up at 5 AM (day 58, Wednesday) and moved to a nearby park, where we could nap some more without the tent. We divided the work; Primož took a nap, and Iris planned the route to Barcelona. This seemed fair at the time. Before we cycled any further, we washed our Merino T-shirts. Even though they were not the cleanest through the last month, they got so dirty and stinky at that point that we couldn’t wear them anymore. So we dressed our second T-shirts and stored the first ones in the panniers. We’ll see if we can save them in Barcelona’s camping washing machine.
We got a donation for the drinks in Spain, so we looked for beer in two stores, trying to find it in the fridge. Without luck, we just took the cans off the shelves, but because it was so hot outside (compared to the temperature in the shop), they felt cold once we opened them in the nearby park. It’s amazing how much small things like cold drinks can improve your mood during such a journey. Simple luxuries.
One of our objectives in the future is to reduce the time in the morning from waking up to sitting on the bikes. We have already figured out how to lean our bikes together and use some straps to fix them. This way, we can leave most of the bags on the bikes instead of taking them off and placing them in the tent. This drastically improved our morning routine. But besides that, we’re slowly trying to figure out some more improvements. Ideally, we would take only a single drybag each (with a sleeping bag, sleeping mat, liner, pillow, clean underwear, and socks) and leave everything else on the bikes. For that, we’re really happy that we bought 4 meters of thin wire that we can wrap through our bags and bikes and take one end into the tent. This gives us more peace of mind, and it reduces the risk of opportunistic petty crime.
That evening, we found a nice place to sleep under some trees, behind the bushes, we were well hidden, but to avoid being seen crawling in there from the road, we waited for the darkness. We got quite good with setting up our tent, and we can easily do it in the dark, but on that particular evening, we didn’t look thoroughly enough at what’s underneath the tent. It sounds worse than it actually was, but when we woke up (day 59, Thursday), there were ants everywhere under the tent. We pitched it up on the anthill. Luckily, they didn’t get inside the tent, and because we use foam pads and tent footprint underneath, we were able to simply shake them off of everything. In the end, it could have been way worse, and we will try to avoid the same mistake in the future.
To reduce the number of punctures we would get, we’re using Tannus between the tube and the tire. And it worked for almost two months and 2.000 kilometers before Primož’s front tire got a puncture, and we had to fix it. The idea behind Tannus is to have foam padding around your inner tube that stops most of the spikes and glass from puncturing your tube. We like the idea, and we can’t tell how many punctures we would get without this, but we were a little disappointed with the size of a spike that got through and caused the puncture. It was a thin little spike, under half a centimeter in length. From the pictures on their website, we expected thicker padding around the inner tube; the one we got honestly feels a little thin. But we don’t know how it looked when it got initially installed in our tires because we had it done at the bike shop. Maybe it’s our fault because we pumped our tires to around 4 bars and this compressed the foam. Nevertheless, we are still happy with Tannus, and we will for sure keep it inside the tires. If it prevents around 90% of punctures, as they advertise on their website, it’s well worth approximately 40€ per tire. But we still bought a bigger stock of tire patches, just in case.
And the tire didn’t get instantly flat at the moment the spike got inside. It slowly leaked the air out, and for over a day, Primož’s bike felt a little wobbly at higher speeds, but he thought that it was because of the bad weight distribution on the front rack, and he kept riding without feeling the tire until it got completely flat. Then, even a blind person could see that the tire was empty, but it still took us some time to stop and figure this out. If nothing else, Tannus probably saved Primož’s tire from being cut by the rim of the wheel because it was this empty. We stopped by the side of the road, inflated the tire, and cycled 5 kilometers to the closest park, where we had a break and patched the inner tube. We had some problems with getting the tire back on the rim and popping inside the canal, but we did it after some trial and error.
We found a place to sleep in the woods by a field, and because we had a full day to spare, we decided to sleep one more night at the same spot. During this day off, we enjoyed our time in the nearby park, just relaxing, reading a book, and writing our blog. The following day (day 61), we got our first and only WarmShowers host in Spain, and we were excited to meet them. We cycled just under 40 kilometers to their place in Granollers, a city north-east of Barcelona. The city had a lot of very steep streets, so it’s good to plan ahead of where you’re going because it can easily happen that you accidentally take a wrong turn and then you have to cycle back uphill. This might have also happened to us. But when we met our hosts, Victoria and Miquel, we were very pleasantly surprised. They were in their sixties and still traveling around the world! And we were even more surprised when they showed us their 8-month tour around South America with their van. And they even jumped over the sea to Antarctica for a few days while they were down there. We loved their story, and they gave us some useful information about South America, like what the roads are like, where to go, and what to avoid. And we even got a whole floor of the house for ourselves. What a luxury! For dinner, we got slices of bread with tomato, olive oil, and salami slices, which is a traditional way of using up the leftover bread in Catalonia. And for dessert, we had shockingly large peaches, the size of a palm. We ended the evening by talking about Catalonia; we learned about their struggle to become an independent country.
On the following day, Sunday (day 62), we finally reached Barcelona. The center of the city was crowded with tourists, especially around the FCB stadium and the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, so we hardly stopped to take some pictures. Otherwise, the ride was nice, and we were very excited to meet Primož’s family, so the last 10 kilometers of the ride just didn’t go by fast enough. Primož’s parents had booked a full week in Tres Estrelas camp, the closest one to the Barcelona International Airport, and we arrived there a couple of hours after them. And who was the happiest to see us after two months? Without a doubt, their dog Rozi, she even peed on the floor because of how happy she was. After the initial greetings and hugs, we relaxed a little bit, then it was time to finally fix the broken back rack on Primož’s bike. And this time, we did it properly. Dad brought all the necessary tools with him; we got the broken screws out of the holes, made the holes bigger, and finished it up with stronger screws. So hopefully, something like this won’t happen again. And, from now on, we will have to check how tight the screws are more often, because we suspect that they broke because they came loose, and then the weight on the back rack just sliced them off.
So, for the next 6 days, we planned to stay in the camp, get some sleep, eat better and more diverse food, and most importantly, get everything ready to leave Europe. Our flight from Barcelona to San Francisco was booked for September 1st, and we still had a lot to do. We started with washing all of our clothes and sleeping pads; we made our tent waterproof again; and we went through all of our items and reevaluated them again to see what we wanted to take with us and what to send back home. We also went to a nearby Decathlon store to get more inner tube patches and some other minor things. Then we had to wash our bikes, disassemble them, and fit them in the cardboard boxes while watching for the weight limit of 23 kg per box. We filtered out all of our electronics and most important things and put them in two bags that we will use as carry-on bags for the planes. And finally, we had to fit everything else in the two suitcases that the family brought us, again watching for the 23 kg weight limit. It was a close fit, but after putting some heavier items in the carry-on, we managed to get all of our luggage to weigh around half a kilogram under the weight limit. Hopefully, our scale was good enough.
In the meantime, we enjoyed big waves in the sea, watching a movie in the evening, and watching all of the planes landing and taking off. It was an interesting experience seeing the planes from this close. And it was crazy to think about how, in a couple of days, we will sit on one of these planes, leaving Europe and going to the opposite part of the world! We were excited about it but also a little bit scared. Who knows what awaits us there? We’re entering a completely unknown territory; we know a little bit about the USA from movies, but going south from there, we had no idea what to expect. A lot of people have warned us to be cautious; they would talk about how dangerous Mexico and Latin America were. But after all, we’re not the first people on such a journey; many have done similar trips, and we believe that most people are kind and love to help you, so we’re sure that we will be all right. And one thing is for sure: some big adventures are waiting for us!
Some more pictures:
