October 31, 2021 – November 21, 2021

Los Angeles and Redondo Beach, CA

Our time in Greater LA was an absolute whirlwind that I am going to sum up here in another bulletpointed list, but I want to give total top-line thank yous to the people who extremely kindly hosted us in their homes for the duration of our stay; Devon, Griffin, and our new friend Lee in Redondo Beach. It was not only lovely to get to spend time with them, but we’re also supremely thankful for having places to land in Los Angeles from which to accomplish all we needed to accomplish while we remained stateside.

That being said, here’s what we got up to in the three weeks we stayed in Los Angeles:

• booked a flight to Barcelona to continue our journey
• maintained and completed repairs on our bicycles
• ate delicious food, especially the street taco setup on the corner of Devon’s street with the al pastor spit
• got some new clothes (shoutout to my wonderful friend Sam who mailed me a hand-picked floral shirt so that I could arrive in LA looking more myself)
• mailed home a bunch of souvenirs and unused gear we’d shipped ahead to LA
• caught up as best we could on the blog and pictures
• sourced bicycle boxes and packing materials to ship our things to Spain with us
• Alyssa spent as much time as possible at the beach
• saw friends, new and old; Devon, Kyla, Griffin, Allissoon, Lee, Oscar & Lexi
• went to a concert for the first time in a long, long time and saw Buck Meek at a beautiful venue
• had an absolutely magnificent meal (and the VIP treatment!) at the wonderful restaurant where Devon works with Devon & Devon’s mom
• met Lee through the omnipresent Iowa bicycle network (yes, Iowa – he is a friend of a friend of the guy who randomly approached us on the street in Grinnell, IA)
• went to our friend Oscar’s art show!! I still can’t believe the serendipity – our friend from Chicago had a show in Los Angeles while we were there so we got to see him and his beautiful work and his lovely partner Lexi
• saw movies; Dune in Koreatown and The French Dispatch in Los Feliz
• went to museums; The Getty and The Broad, both of which were great but the Broad especially so
• enjoyed bumming around Koreatown at night
• cooked in real kitchens quite a bit! Mediterranean chicken salad, pork and mustard green soup, smash burgers, roast chicken & potatoes, and more I’m forgetting
• visited the Redondo Pier with Ky
• got the local-knowledge driving tour of the South Bay from Lee including the Korean Friendship Bell
• got our covid boosters
• saw my grandparents in Wildomar and my uncle and cousin in Hollywood

Suffice it to say, we had an action packed three week stint in LA! It was honestly not at all restful, but it was nice to see everyone we know before heading off into the great wide world. We spent the last couple days trying to source things to pack our bikes and mailing off the last of our postcards and souvenirs, and with one giant push (including Griffin totally saving the day by driving us to get new bike boxes on absolutely 0 notice) we had our bikes packed into boxes and all our belongings packed into storage crates to ship overseas.

Devon woke up with us well before dawn to drop us off at the airport, and we shared a slightly teary goodbye as we shipped off to Spain to start the next chapter.

November 22, 2021 – November 27, 2021

Flying, landing, Barcelona sightseeing

The airport was weird and stressful but not any more than it normally is, really – except normally I’m not trusting TSA with every worldly possession I carry, but hey whatever.

The flights were easy, if a bit cramped. We connected through Miami, stopping long enough to see real big clouds for the first time in months (weird how you get used to either a totally blue sky or a totally gray sky in the desert for a few months).

The flight from Miami to Barcelona was “overnight”, and landed us in Spain around 7:30 AM. We tried and mostly failed to get some fitful sleep on the plane, and landed somewhat delirious in Europe for the first time in our lives.

We flew through customs and immigration (no questions at all, really? I was surprised, especially in the covid era) and made it down to baggage to find our bicycles and our possessions had all arrived intact and unharmed. We set to work right there in the bizarrely empty terminal of this huge airport reassembling our bicycles.

After about an hour of pretty concerted effort rebuilding our bikes and repacking our stuff into our panniers as usual, we were ready to go. Alyssa watched the stuff as I wheeled around our empty bike boxes and packing trash on a baggage cart looking for the trash. My Spanish is somewhere between “horrible” and “non-existent”, and so I mostly just walked up to anyone with an air of authority and said, “Basura?” in as pathetic a tone as I could muster. Eventually someone at the information desk very vaguely pointed me to a random point I might be able to leave them, and so I just scuttled the cart somewhere near the taxi stand and hoped for the best. Sorry, employees of Barcelona airport!

Basura settled, we pedaled our bicycles straight out of the terminal (after asking for some help locating the appropriate path) and onto a bicycle path. Our first foray into cycling in Europe was better than I even expected – a bike path straight to the airport??? Crazy.

We biked in some strong winds towards Barcelona proper, incredulous that we’d somehow made it to Europe. All the signs were unintelligible to us, everything was weird and new and wow we really did do this, huh? The bike path from the airport carried us through nearby smaller cities and next to traffic (Peugeots, Renaults, Fiats, oh my!) on narrow streets. It was wild.

We arrived in Barcelona after some somewhat hairy city biking we didn’t really understand (why do the bike lanes in Spain change sides randomly? Why are they sometimes in the middle of the street randomly? Who knows). We’d booked an Airbnb for a few days to get acclimated and to spend a little time in Barcelona to celebrate both Thanksgiving and our 9th anniversary.

After checking in at the Airbnb’s affiliated hotel we hopped over to our rented apartment in the extremely beautiful and charming neighborhood of Gracía. We’d officially arrived!!

We went out to our first meal in Spain, a Lebanese restaurant nearby where we were staying. We were somewhat delirious and exhausted from being awake for a really long time, and after dinner both of us absolutely crashed (food in your stomach will do that!). We tried our absolute best to stave off the jet lag by staying awake until it was bedtime in Barcelona, but both of us (I think I went first, really) passed out on the couch around 5. An hour later Alyssa woke up and I moved to the real bed, sleeping fully soundly until the following morning at 7 AM.

We spent almost a week in Barcelona, getting acclimated and doing sightseeing. It was really very nice to land and have a moment to gather ourselves before jumping into the deep end of navigating a country we’ve never been to by bicycle. Plus, Gracía is truly a charming neighborhood full of all the “European” charm we could have hoped for.

One thing before I get to the bullet pointed list of Barcelona activities; Alyssa and I decided in Los Angeles that at the end of our time in Barcelona, we would ride separately for a little while just to have an opportunity to miss one another and to experience what alone time feels like after 4 months in basically 24/7 contact. All of the days following Barcelona are solely my (Kevin’s) account, having left one the city one day after Alyssa.

We got up to plenty in Barcelona, though! In our 5 days there, we:

• found the Perfect Bar Cafe in Café d’en Francesc, run by a Catalonian man named Francesc who made perfect coffee and perfect sandwiches for the perfect price – and had the perfect patience with our horrible Spanish (even though he and everyone else there spoke Catalan)
• had homemade vermouth and wonderful tapas at a local Catalonian bar bodega on Thanksgiving
• saw what felt like an infinite number of Gaudí-designed buildings; La Sagrada Familia, Park Guell, and a million smaller works, all very inspiring to see
• Walked La Rambla and saw the Central Market, bustling with tourists and overpriced but beautiful food (we tried Jamón Ibérico here, too)
• tried as much Catalan-specific food as we could understand and order
• ate an infinite quantity of delicious pastries
• got our nails done
• saw the Mediterranean Sea for the first time at the harbor
• practiced our horrible Spanish (well, my horrible Spanish. Alyssa’s is better than mine)

November 28, 2021

Barcelona, ES – Tamarit, ES

I woke in the morning after having slept through all my alarms until the late, late hour of 9:15 am. Not what I intended, but after some momentary frustration I resigned myself to my late fate. I got my stuff together in the room, then headed downstairs to enjoy a reprisal of the insanely nice hotel breakfast. Some decaf cafes con leche, pa amb tomaquet, and fruit later, I went back to the room to haul all my stuff down to the lobby and check out.

All my things on my bike for the first real day of riding since we got to Los Angeles, I felt a bit strange. I felt like I had been swimming in a cold body of water for long enough to get acclimated, gotten out, and now had to brace myself to jump back in. Plus, I was getting on the road about 2 hours later than I wanted, whoops.

The riding out of Barcelona was easy and beautiful. Past beautiful architecture on all sides, excellent bicycle infrastructure welcomed me to Europe and took me all the way out of the city, back towards the airport where we’d come from and beyond.

The route I was following was the route that our bicycle shop friend, Koos, passed along to us. It would take us all the way from Barcelona to Valencia, but for today it was taking me out of the city and along beautiful stretches of Mediterranean coastline. I met the Mediterranean for the first time just outside Barcelona, and I stopped to wheel my bike down to the water’s edge and collected some shells to commemorate the experience.

The riding was rewarding but a little laborious – both because I was rusty and because it was really very windy this particular day (with gusts over 20mph, Alyssa would later inform me).

After some cruising down the boardwalks of several beachside resort towns, I came to a section of climbing up and over some rocky hills toward the town of Sitges. The climbing was beautiful, offering tremendous sweeping vistas of the Mediterranean coast both north and south. It was also a little treacherous – I wasn’t the only bike on the road, but the road has little to no shoulder and I found myself climbing as fast as I could just to get out of the way of the line of cars filing in behind me. At one point, as I powered up a little section of hill, I was passed by two bike guys in full lycra kit, who exclaimed that I was a “maquina”. You’re damn right!

Alyssa having left a day ahead of me meant that I had some useful intel – she told me to expect some hills at certain points, and urged me to stop for coffee in the historic old center of Sitges for some peak European experience. So with that intel in mind, I did exactly that. Even though I was at this point hours behind where I wanted to be, I stopped and got a coffee and croissant and took in the radical change in location we’d brought ourselves, sitting outside a cafe in a narrow Catalonian street. Wild.

Back on the bike, I made generally kind of poor time as I putzed down the beach against a tough wind, watching the sun move in what felt like fast forward towards the horizon. While taking a quick 5 minute breather on the side of the bike path in Playa de Coma-ruga, a man with a salt-and-pepper look and scarf approached me and asked, “De donde vienes?”. Even though I absolutely do not speak Spanish, I understood, and replied, “de Chicago, en los Estados Unidos”. He switched to English, and replied that he was from Montreal. We had a brief chat about what I was up to, what he was up to (driving around the Spanish coast in a camper van), and he offered to share his parking spot/camp site with me, mentioning that it was nearby. I politely declined, seeing as I wanted to make up for lost time and make sure I had a strong showing my first day out. We exchanged names, and Jessy told me that he’d give me a honk if he saw me while driving down the Spanish coast one of these days. In case you skipped overwrought text analysis in your high school English class, take this note: THIS IS FORESHADOWING.

I hustled as best I could down the road, moving briefly away from the coast onto a 2 lane highway just as the sun fully set. Riding after dark was pretty categorically NOT in my plans for the day, but when you wake up super late and it’s nearing the winter solstice, here we are. I turned all my lights on for one of the few times so far this trip, and made my way along, following Google’s guiding hand.

Google’s guiding hand promptly led me onto a beach. Like, the actual, honest to goodness, no-path-just-sand beach. I didn’t really realize because it was pitch black at this point, but long story short I decided it was easier to push my bike through the sand for a mile and a half than to turn around and go all the way back out to the road. This was probably a mistake, as I truly struggled to heave my heavy bicycle through the wet sand in total darkness aside from my (now dying) front light. At one point, I saw a couple walking towards me and I attempted to ask them in improvised Spanish if there was an easy way to get back to the street from here – they responded in lightning fast, unintelligible-to-me Catalan, and after some repeating ourselves on both sides, they repeated the word “recto” over and over to me until I understood that it meant “just keep going straight you dumb tourist”. Actually though, they were very nice and patient, this is more my inner monologue speaking.

Having gone recto, the beach ended in a road, which I took the half mile or so to the entrance to my campground environs for the evening. At check in, before I went in, I practiced my Spanish phrases on Google Translate before entering the door. After about 5 seconds of that shtick, the clerk asked me if I spoke English – after pushing my bike on the beach in the dark, I dropped the pretense and just leaned into the lazy tourist bit and finished the process in English – it was definitely faster that way.

On to my campsite, the clerk set me up behind the bathroom building to shield me from the still intense winds. This worked swimmingly, and I had no problem setting up my tent in the absolute silence of this secluded section of an almost completely empty resort campground. I got my bed ready, ate a dinner of whatever snacks I had been carrying to that point, caught up with Alyssa on the phone, brushed my teeth, and turned in after a very physically exhausting but beautiful day on the bike. Welcome to Spain!

November 29, 2021

Tamarit, ES – L’Hospitalet de l’Infant, ES

Woke in the morning at a much more reasonable hour than the day prior, around 7:30. I got buzzing pretty quick in the chilly morning air and broke camp by 8:15 or so. I made a quick pitstop at the campground supermarket (because that’s a thing at these resort campgrounds in Europe, I guess) to grab some road snacks for later – a couple ham and cheese croissants, some sugary snacks, and some napkins to use as paper towel.

I had noticed the previous night that the closest restaurant was a 24-hour truck stop buffet with a charcoal grill, and feeling deserving of a nice breakfast and a few moments indoors, headed out that way. Upon arrival it was explained to me that the buffet only operates during certain (lunchtime) hours, but the rest of the restaurant was still open. The man behind the bar helped me through the options in slow, deliberate Spanish and I selected a pork tenderloin bocadillo, or sandwich, with a decaf cafe con leche. The resulting sandwich of pork sliced and grilled to order on a roaring fire directly in front of me was insanely delicious for the low, low price of something like 3 euro. Spain is absolutely wildin’ with breakfast prices.

My breakfast itch scratched, I finally got on the road. My goal for the day was to make it to another campground with cheap tent sites just past the city of L’Hospitalet de l’Infant, which meant that I’d be doing more beachside riding all day long, more or less. Early in the day, I passed through the town of Tarragona, where Alyssa had slept the previous night in a hotel. Tarragona has a beautiful set of Roman ruins scattered around the city limits and I made a small detour to go look at all of them, even though they were all technically closed. The amphitheater was so large that it didn’t really matter and I got close enough to enjoy it through the fence with some stray cats keeping me company.

Back on the road, I cruised down a mixture of beachfront bike paths and local highways, making my way southwest. I was making good time, and near my destination around 1:15 or so, when I turned a corner on a city street in Cambrils and saw none other than my new friend Jessy from Quebec who I’d met some 45 miles away or so the previous afternoon. We flagged each other down in obvious excitement at the serendipity, and I pulled over to say hello again. In the intervening 24 hours, he’d picked up a Danish hitchhiker named Johannes who spoke terrific English, and after a brief moment chatting on the side of the road we resolved to go find somewhere to eat lunch together.

We found a nondescript restaurant down the street and set to ordering the fixed price menú del dia. A thing I was not aware was so omnipresent here before arriving, the menú del dia is an often affordable fixed price menu, usually with two courses and a dessert or coffee. In this case, for the exorbitant price of 10 euro, I got rice with vegetables, steak with fries, crema Catalan which is basically creme brulee, and a coffee. It was wonderful. Burying the lede here – the company was also wonderful. Johannes and Jessy were both easy conversationalists who had done their fair share of traveling, especially Johannes considering he was younger than I was. We took a very Spanish lunch over an hour or two, engrossed in a wide ranging conversation about anything and everything.

As we broke the lunch, we talked about where were off to for the night, and I mentioned that I had plans to camp relatively nearby. They agreed to meet me over there and we’d all have some camp company for the evening! So off we all went, Jessy and Johannes in Jessy’s camper, and me on my bike.

Some 45 minutes later, I popped into the parking lot of the last supermarket before the campground, and Jessy and Johannes were already there. We all decided to gather the ingredients for some dinner, and Jessy offered to cook in his camper for us. I grabbed a bottle of wine, Johannes grabbed some Catalonian cheese, and off we went. Side note: I also grabbed a lemon Fanta for the first time here, which have since become my absolute favorite pop and my new bicycling vice. Step aside, Casey’s Sour Mix.

Near the campground, Jessy pulled over and mentioned that they had seen a camper parking lot where we could set up for free instead, and I eagerly agreed to save my 8 euro (and Jessy’s 20 something euro) and head there. Just up the street, we found the camper lot, a gravel parking lot with water hookups and a beach view. Not bad for literally free!

It was slightly windy still, so I set up my tent in the wind shadow of Jessy’s camper. Meanwhile, Johannes walked into a nearby copse of trees to go set up his hammock for the night. Our accommodations ready, we settled into Jessy’s camper.

While Jessy cooked, we whiled away the evening with great conversation, delicious cheese and wine, and traded travel stories and suggestions for music, books, and movies. It was lovely, easy, and relaxing hanging out. Sometime during the cooking process though, I noticed the wind gusts picking up a little bit and asked Jessy to keep an eye on my tent – and a few minutes later he said that it was not looking good.

We opened the door to the camper into very strong winds – the strongest I’ve felt so far on this trip, maybe 45-55 mph. The tent did not look good, and I was surprised to see it; some 30 minutes ago the wind was maybe 10 mph and relatively predictable, but this was absolutely whipping in from changing directions. The tent was getting collapsed and folded in, despite being staked well and full of my bags. After a few moments trying to wrestle with it, we decided it was probably best to just take the whole thing down and try again later if the wind calmed down. That in itself was quite the task, but soon we got the thing down and tucked away in the front seat of the camper. I couldn’t tell what the damage was in the dark, but I could tell it’d suffered some injuries in the strong winds.

Excitement of that moment aside, we had an absolutely lovely time relaxing in the camper over Jessy’s tremendous cooking (a lovely chicken curry with a bunch of delicious veggies and rice). We talked for hours, and polished off a few bottles of wine until the wee hours of the morning. Eventually when we decided to turn in around 3 am, I went to set my tent back up in the now-wind-free outdoors, and retired to bed.

November 30, 2021

L’Hospitalet de l’Infant, ES – Sant Carles de la Rapita, ES

In the morning, I woke up by some miracle at a relatively normal hour. I got dressed and out of the tent by 9, and surveyed the damage from last night in the morning light. The wind had bent one of the tent poles into a cool new shape, ripped one of the attachment points of the fly clean off, and tore a hole in the door of the fly on one side. Ouch. Not my favorite news, especially considering it happened on my watch.

Jessy woke up around the same time as I did, and came out as I was breaking down my worse-for-wear tent. Soon after, Johannes joined us, and we chatted in the morning sunshine over some fruit and the remainder of the cheese from the night before. After a good little while of chatting in the car park, I decided to take my leave and hit the road after a group selfie and an exchanging of contact info. It was lovely to spend time with those two, and felt like the type of stuff this trip is all about.

Back on the road, I tried to get some miles in before my 4 hours or so of sleep caught up with me. The plan for the day was to bike south all the way across the delta of the Ebro river, a natural reserve and rice-farming area of partially inundated lowlands along the coast.

The riding was fairly nondescript, although pretty to look at, and I made good time in the morning, stopping only for a bocadillo and cafe con leche at a Repsol gas station because of course you can get espresso at a gas station in Europe. I made it to the north end of the delta by early afternoon, and after navigating a construction site with badly improvised Spanish and hand gestures, I made it out onto the delta itself.

The Ebro is the longest river entirely in Spain, and empties out into the Mediterranean Sea in the large wetland delta on its northeastern shores. The deposition of silt and soil downstream over time has led to the lengthening of the delta – the town of Amposta, a few miles inland, was founded as a port city in the 4th century.

All fun facts aside, primarily it was just beautiful. It felt like bicycling across the surface of a lake for miles, as water surrounds tiny roads and pathways on every side. The towns on the delta almost felt like Venice, with the water level an omnipresent feature of their geography from any view. Waterfowl stand out in the shallows in great numbers, and I lost count of the different types that I saw.

I rode through the delta as the day got cooler and the sun ducked behind the clouds. My goal was a hotel in Sant Carles de la Rapita, on the southern edge of the delta. As I turned towards the city, a headwind turned to meet me, and I put my headphones on to try and power through the remaining miles.

I arrived at my hotel earlier than I expected, a few minutes before 3. I opened the door to find no one at the desk, and as I went back out to my bike to take my gloves and helmet off the apparent host walked up and greeted me. Ramon, who spoke very decent English, seemed excited that I had arrived on a bike, and told me all about his own bike collection. We had a jovial chat while he checked me in, about how he loved the New York Knicks and visited NYC to see them play in late February 2020 just before covid broke out. He was excited about our trip and offered to help me carry my bike up to the room, which I declined – but the offer was very nice!

I got settled in my room and decided that after all the socializing of the last 24 hours, I was pretty done trying to speak to people – in English, Spanish, Catalan, or otherwise, and resolved to eat the food I had in my bags for dinner and relax. I talked on the phone for a long time to my brother Elliot and my dad as I repaired the hole in our tent fly. I took a shower and bath in the tiny European bathtub before retiring relatively early to recoup some of my lost sleep the night before.

December 1, 2021

Sant Carles de la Rapita, ES – Sant Mateu, ES

I slept like a baby in the comfort of my hotel bed and woke up at the relatively reasonable hour of 7:30 or so. I enjoyed being inside for a few more minutes before gathering my things and hauling them downstairs to check out.

I stopped at a cafe in town to have some breakfast and let the sun warm the air for a little while, and had an absolute spread of palmeras, a donut, a cafe con leche, and a bocadillo de jamon (the best one yet, on incredible toasted bread). I sat outside on the patio under a heater enjoying my spread for a few minutes in silence, which was very relaxing.

I had a relatively short day with a little bit of climbing in store to reach the town of Sant Mateu, where Alyssa would be meeting me again. Sant Mateu was away from the coast a little bit, and therefore, up in elevation – Alyssa, coming from farther south down the coast, had more of a climb in store as I was able to take a more gently graded route through farmland to get there.

I left the comfort of the cafe and got on the road, and as I turned away from the coast I was almost immediately floored by the scenery. Normally, farmland really bums me out – endless row after row of industrial monoculture farming in the United States can be really tiring to look at and a bummer to think too hard about – but the farmlands near the coast were truly beautiful. Short, rolling hills were covered with olive, orange, lemon, and grapefruit trees, and the ground often covered by flowering plants I imagine to help attract pollinators. The hillsides smelled as beautiful as they looked – orange peel and rosemary blended on any strong breeze, and farmhands burned piles of olive branches as they cleared them, sending fragrant smoke into the wind.

I stopped multiple times just to take it in, stopping to swipe a few tangerines from a tree hanging over the road (with plenty of dropped fruit on the ground… I figured two more wouldn’t hurt anybody). It looked the way I imagined Spain would look, and I reveled in it for most of the day.

The riding was not bad, only gently uphill most of the time and with my constant friend Mr. Headwind lessened to only a few miles per hour. Certainly, it could have been gale force and I’m not sure how much I would have minded on this particular ride – the beauty of the landscape was bolstering my mood regardless.

I stopped at a grocery store in the middle of the day as I passed through a medium sized town, and got some snacks – some cookies, a lemon Fanta, some baked goods, and some candy. The lunch of champions, truly. I kept on down the road, and arrived in Sant Mateu maybe an hour and change after Alyssa.

We’d booked a hotel in town for the night for cheap, and we reunited on its front steps. It was nice to see her again after a few days apart – and kind of weird after 4 months on the road to be given the opportunity to miss one another for a moment. We got my stuff up into the room, and then Alyssa took me on a walking tour of town (as she’d already canvassed more or less the whole place in the time before I arrived), showing me the old church, convent, public baths, and an empty lot with a litter of adorable stray kittens (who were out at the moment, but whom we’d catch up with later).

The hotel situation was a bit strange – when Alyssa had arrived there was not really anyone there to check her in, and after some confused back and forth with a woman there, she received a key to a room and a promise that someone would call her later to try and sort out the booking (and payment) details. We took showers and relaxed in the room after our town tour while we waited for restaurants to re-open for dinner and for our supposed hotel contact to get ahold of us.

Right before we left to go get food, there was a knock on the door. It was the owner of the hotel, a very kind and friendly man who explained in Spanish that he’d been in the somewhat nearby city of Castelló for the day and had only just returned. He gave us a different, non-housekeeping key to our room, and Alyssa sorted out the booking details with him while I finished getting ready.

Officially on the books, we went out to walk around and find some place to eat. The first place we tried was what seemed like a local bar and tapas spot, but when we arrived the guy was just leaving, with a sign in Catalan on the door saying he’d be back in 10 minutes. We waited on the patio for what was actually more like 5 before he returned, and we went inside to get food. He only had sandwiches at the time, though, so we decided to try our luck somewhere else.

We went back to the town square and into the busiest looking bar restaurant there, assuming that was probably a good sign. We got some vermouth and I got a pizza and Alyssa got a salad. It was a nice little date night after a few days flying solo.

After dinner, we popped over to the grocery store to grab some snacks, and we saw our friends the stray cats out on the street. Alyssa grabbed a can of wet cat food at the store, and we took it over to the empty lot and made friends with the lot of skittish cats, watching them take turns being brave enough to go over and nibble at the food at our feet.

We retired to our room, and relaxed in bed for a while, watching some American house show dubbed in Spanish. It was nice to be back in each other’s company!

December 2, 2021

Sant Mateu, ES – Castelló de la Plana, ES

The weather forecast for the day looked a bit scary the preceding night. Winds were forecast to be against us to the tune of 20-25 mph, and we were hoping to descend back towards the coast to the city of Castelló some 60-ish miles away. Or, at least as far as the wind would let us, anyway.

We woke up in the morning and could hear the wind already howling against the windows intermittently, but we got our things together and got out of the hotel around 9.

We pit stopped at a bakery in town that looked good and took turns getting some baked goods. I had an interaction that’s still very funny to me – I was speaking horrible Spanish to the kind woman behind the counter, who asked me in Spanish if I spoke Portuguese, because my bad Spanish had a Brazilian Portuguese accent even though I’m from the US. Turns out my slightly-less-bad-but-still-bad Portuguese has rubbed off on me!

Pastries acquired, we headed out of town. We tried to go to a cheese maker near the edge of town, but the building seemed fully abandoned and at the very least closed at the moment we showed up. Google disagreed, but Google has no idea what hours any business in Spain truly operates.

We begrudgingly got on the road after enough delaying, and got out of town. Much to our pleasant surprise, the wind we thought would be in our face was actually at our backs, and we started absolutely flying down the road. We made terrific time, stopping only occasionally to take the odd picture or stretch our legs.

A little more than halfway to Castelló, we stopped in the early afternoon in a town near our route to try and get a bite to eat. Not having yet learned our lesson about the hours of businesses in Spain, almost nothing was open – restaurants and bars weren’t open yet, and most bakeries had closed. We popped into the only open bakery and got a spread of both savory and sweet treats to refuel while we decided if we had the juice to get all the way to Castelló today. I have a distinct visual memory of the wind crumpling the patio shade tent just outside the window and thinking, “Wow am I glad that’s not against me for once”!

Resolved to make it the rest of the way, we got back on the road and hustled with the tailwind at our backs. We made further excellent time with the fastest riding since we got to Europe, and made it to the hillside town of Borriol with plenty of daylight to spare. We stopped for a quick café descafeinado in the town square of Borriol and snapped a few pictures of the scenic little town, at the foot of a rocky cliff with a castle on top (as so many of these towns are).

After Borriol, we turned towards the coast, and the combination of wind and downhill bearing meant that we basically didn’t need to pedal for the last 10 miles or so of our ride, and we flew into Castelló. Castelló seemed like a cute small city, with the amenities of infrastructure but also the ability to cross it in basically half an hour. We rolled into town to our Airbnb that Alyssa had booked the previous night, and got our belongings up and settled in. It was confusing to get settled in – the heater took 45 minutes to turn on after being ‘turned on’, and the TV didn’t want to work, but we got things figured out.

We decided to book this room for two days and take a rest day (mostly at my behest – I’d caught up to Alyssa despite leaving a day later, so I was a tired lil’ guy). So we popped over to the grocery store to have a dinner in for once, gathering supplies for a salad and for breakfast the following morning. We got clean and warm in our rented room, and enjoyed the relative normalcy of preparing a healthy dinner for ourselves inside.

December 3, 2021

Castelló rest day

At the end of the preceding night, Alyssa started to feel pretty unwell, and based on past occurrences of these things we think she had ruptured an ovarian cyst. Suffice to say, she did not sleep well, and her rest day was at the very least timed well given that she couldn’t really leave the couch for most of the day.

I tried to take care of some business I had while we were sitting still, and ran out to get a tailor to fix our ripped tent, get some cash, and pop by the city market to grab some nice Catalonian raw milk cheese – priorities.

We did our laundry (after much to-do, we couldn’t find the damn washer for like half an hour because it was neatly tucked away behind a door in the kitchen), tried to relax and recuperate. Around the early afternoon, Alyssa was feeling well enough/bored enough to try and go give one of these Spanish menú del dia deals a shot, and we had a lovely meal just across the street for 10 euro apiece. Afterwards, we went on a walk to try and get some of Alyssa’s errands checked off – finding new headphones and popping into a thrift store to buy some pants.

We managed to check the latter off the list, and almost the former with the exception that the headphones she bought at the cell phone accessory store had a constant buzz when you used them, so she took them back. Oh well.

We walked around a little bit, grabbing some delicious pastries as always, and then headed back to the Airbnb to relax for the rest of the evening. It was too bad that Alyssa’s rest day was colored by being in so much pain, but we still managed to get almost all of our rest day errands done, including a nice meal. What a trooper.