Day 2 – Tours|Cerezo de Abajo
September 3rd, 2011
A bright but slightly overcast day on the Loire. Pack up the bike and set off south towards Bordeaux some 330km to the south. By late morning I am crossing the Gironde having just crossed through the vineyards of the right bank, hit the left bank. There are the signs for some of the most prestigious vineyards in the world, St Julien, St Estephe etc, which normally I’d be pulling over and inspecting for quality, but not this time.
I haven’t been this way since I was 14 back in 1983 on a family holiday with my parents. Off course the vineyards were off limits then and would have been wasted on a skinny 15 year old anyway, although a carafe of two may have been sneaked past the parents from one of the hotel bars at some point! I keep heading south towards Bayonne and Biarritz and pass the turnoff for Arcachon where we had rented a villa in 1983. The place sticks in my mind simply because it was the first time in my life I saw naked breasts on the beach – vive la difference, there were lots of reasons to love France on that beach ;).
Bayonne and Biarritz, well, it started raining and was rather miserable, perhaps its simply the fact that I’m getting close to the Pyrenees. The traffic on the other side of the road is horrendous, I cruise past some 20km of tailbacks, half of which seem to be fruit and vegetable 40 trailers heading to northern Europe form Spain and Portugal. There was the odd truck of port heading north as well! A lot of freight seems to be passing through here – Bridgette Bardot cannot be happy about this!
Hit the Spanish border and the rain has stopped and road has become a perfect biking road, long sweeping curves through the mountains, and lots of bridges and tunnels – and all signs are now in Spanish and Basque, the latter being completely undecipherable as it’s not related to any other European language – in fact they have no idea where it, or the Basques, actually originate from, or how they came to be there. The Canadian exhaust on the bike that replaced the rather quieter European one last year after it was nicked from the bike in Rotterdam seems not to have too much in the way of baffles in it and the other day I realized that it’s almost a straight pipe with only a US Forestry Service approved spark arrestor in it – I hope the Basques approve. Discovered that if I ride almost in the centre of the tunnels you get the full effect of it reflected by the curve of the tunnel walls – excellent – not quite screaming eagle, but not bad regardless!
No rain on the plain in Spain!
One las long 3km tunnel and out the other side and the country side has changed entirely to big rolling plains of Castille & Leon – and no more Basque on the signs either. Heading towards Burgos and on towards Madrid. It reminds me of driving across Saskatchewan as the sun sets in the west. Glorious sunset and I pull off the highway into a field to take a break and admire it. I also notice that it’s getting cold and a chill growing. Motor on but by 9.30pm decide to call it a day and pull off at a small town about 60miles north of Madrid. Very rustic Spanish town with a small hotel and lots of locals congregated in the bar. Negotiate a room for €35 and the girl says something about it being “Frio” (cold) outside – it is. But a dinner of Octopus, bread and a glass of local beer soon helps. Off to bed. Covered 950km (590 miles) today and I’m pretty tired – the longest one day distance I’ve covered on a bike was 625 miles from Minneapolis to Sturgis back on 2008 with Lars, so I was quite pleased with that. Looking at the map it’s 803km to the ferry terminal at Tarifa on the south coast of Spain. So I think I will simply stay on the south coast of Spain on Sunday night and then head to Morocco on Monday morning – riding tired is a really bad and dangerous idea!
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