S2 : Day 14 - Steve’s Tour de Barcelona

Final day riding with dad in Barcelona 

Matt, Shruti and I started our day by waking up at about 4:30 and getting Shruti and her trusty btwin to the airport. As a bit of a fun fact, Shruti has the only bike that did both Scorches. The trip to the airport went super smooth, and we came back and put in a few more hours of sleep. We should have taken a farewell pic... but everyone was so tired, first priority was getting her safely to her flight and the next priority was getting back to bed :)

At 9:30, Matt, dad and I set off for our last jamon y queso and cafe con leche together. I think we picked the least Spanish cafe in Barcelona to have it. It was called "California bar" or something. Surfboards on the walls etc. We took a short walk to Probike, who were so nice to give me two bike boxes. We browsed the shop, Matt and I drooled over the Orbea’s and Trek bikes and I cried a little when i saw the prices. I think the cheapest was 2200 euro. 😵 We saw a lot of super cool looking mountain e-bikes with the most expensive being 10k euro!! It seems the trend is to now have a powred bike to get up the mountain and then you bang it down. Makes sense so that you can do more runs before you get tired.

final bfast - had to be ham and cafe con leche 

wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

Orbeas, Treks, Cannondales ... I love my Treks, but an Orbea wld be nice

After dragging two humongous bike boxes about a mile back to the airbnb, Matty packed up his bike in a respectable 24mins( yes we timed it ) and dad and I got our bikes ready for one final trek through Barcelona.

Matty was the next to depart...

Shhhhh .. im securing my fork. #babysox

You can check out the Strava posting here: https://www.strava.com/activities/1366504308 . The 18miles felt like a nice reprieve given we were averaging about 80 miles a day the last 10 days. Suprisingly we still put in about 2k ft of climbing. What was not surprising is that el flato experienced 2 new flats :)

800 Spanish miles on this 1990 Classic

artsy art museum shot

Olympic park

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I spilled half this coffee on me :)

Columbus monument

gothic quarters

the beach area was pretty nice

We covered a good chunk of the city and saw the art museum, Olympic park, Montjuic castle, the beach, the Christopher Columbus monument, rode through the gothic quarter, saw la rambla[ and fixed a flat there ] :) , and then circled back to the hotel.

At night mr Eric found a location for some awesome [ and I mean awesome tapas ]. The way it worked was by counting up the sticks. I forget the pricing exactly, but one stick was 1 euro and another was like 1.5 euro. You would eat the tapas, put the stick in a glass and then the waiter would count em to give you your bill. We should have came here the night before as the final team meal. Next time :)

We finished the night with a trip to Decathalon to find some deals and souvenirs. It was a great last day.

Reflecting back after all of these months on the trips ups and downs. The cold, rain, mud, elevations, chains busting, flats, drains flooding, bikes breaking down and bodies breaking down were all a part of making the experience. It was a challenging adventure with so many learning moments that we will take with us to the next trip.[packing lighter!] 

The trip was officially over, but if i could jump on a plane right now and do it all again exactly as is ...  I would. :)

S2 : Day 13 - Speeding back to Barca

Our last group pic ... :(

After 800miles and 42000 ft of climbing the bicycling journey was over 😔 and we had well oiled and orchestrated timelines to hit! We had to drive back to Barca, 750 miles back to make sure Shruti got her midnight plane to Bangalore. At the end of Day 12 we left Tarifa and drove back to Malaga to give us a bit of a head start on the journey home. I used google timeline, which keeps track of your phones positioning. You can see that there are two dots near the center of the country, that is the way we circled back to Barcelona.

We got to Barca in one piece stopping a bit along the way for food, gas and more food. I cant turn down Spanish Burger King :)

Unfortunately we underestimated the ultra advanced radar system they have in Spain and with no exaggeration I think we got 6 speeding tickets!! =/ they all hit us a few weeks later. Eric's nickname is now "lead foot Z" 

That night we were pretty tired, had some Thai food[ i know - we are in Spain ... wtf ] and then packed Shruti's box and got her on her plane. 

It was sad.

Eric's poor bike from Espana - feel bad we left it

I almost got a pic of Shruti sleeping :) damn!!

bfast - spanish style. Has to have jamon

these were delicious!

view from the car ... speeding car

el flato slumbers

this pic of Shruti makes it all worthwhile... it is like a primal scream :)

what i have learned is do not fall asleep first

sorry Shilps :P

fixing and even packing bikes until the very end ... #heaven

stay tuned ... one more day to go ... Steve's tour de Barcelona :)

S2 : Day 12 - Nuestra manera

we did it our way

The final day's 3 cyclists

Our last day of cycling was upon us. The night before we had stayed in the nicest and warmest of the airbnbs. The place was massive. Everyone had their own room [ i think ], there was multiple bathrooms, towels, nice decor, it was a good spot and worth it. Looking back on it and how we[ well maybe actually just me ] are anal about documenting everything, I dont know why i didnt take pics of all the different places we stayed at. Would have been fun to look back on them. Oh well... next time. :)

I was up to about midnight touching up the bikes and filling the tires with air, adjusting brakes ( i didnt count, but i would say between mine, Shruti’s and my dad’s bikes, I had to fiddle with them at least 15-20x ) I wanted to make sure the bikes were as comfy and tuned in as I could make them for the last day. It seemed to work. The brakes were tight, chain was lubed, but i should have checked the inside of my dad's tire. It seems that there was a small piece of road shrapnel, like the one i found on the outside of Matt's tire earlier in the trip, however my dad's case was that it was on the inner lining and that caused my dad to have about 18 flats between our start and Tarifa. The legend of "el flato" will live forever in the annals of Spanish cycling lore. :)

I was excited that we were going to reach the tip of Spain, but also dreading that the trip was coming to a close and it was our last day. After a good 9 months of planning we were about to finish. Even writing this blog weeks later, it stills gives me a sense of disappointment to write that the trip has come to a close. When I compare it to the India trip, i didnt feel as sad because I know either for work or on my own I will visit India again. Ive been there about 6/7x so there is a good chance that I will return. Spain on the otherhand I have only ever been to once, this trip, and I have no work relations to the country, so there is a good chance I wouldnt return, but in all honesty I feel like I have unfinished business in the country and if I can convince the family I would do a solo trip from Madrid to Lisbon one day. Just Blast through 400/500 miles in 5 days on my road bike.

The day prior we had completed a considerable ride of 93mi with our largest elevation gain of 6600ft! So after about 730miles and the previous days ups and downs we were tired. The night before I made sure to wrap my legs with bandages[tight compression] and take an ibuprofen for the inflammation. Compression of the muscles has been working for me for years to recover faster. You can read about it here: RICE method ( rest, ice, compression, elevation ) https://www.webmd.com/first-aid/tc/rest-ice-compression-and-elevation-rice-topic-overview

Getting back to the day ahead, after checking the route it seems that the very south of Spain doesn't have too many straight through road options given the mountains and coast, but it did have one road that we could take. When Shruti and I planned the original route for the tour, we made every effort to keep us off of the major roads for three reasons: safety, scenery and we thought it was against the law. It turns out that Spain is super bike friendly and their main highways and roads have a wide shoulder that bikes can ride on, but not all of them! Of course that one type of road: Autovias, or the A roads as we called them, was the one we needed to ride on. Thankfully there seemed to be a bit of a caveat, this A road also overlapped for the first 18mi or so with other N and E roads. So we knew which way we had to go, muscle it out for the first two or so hours and then we would have “clear” roads ahead. Clear with 6500ft worth of elevation gains where the highest point being 340m. ** sigh ** :)

Let's get to the stats!

Ride Statistics

Date ....................... Thursday January 18th 2018

Strava Link ................ https://www.strava.com/activities/1363266226

Total Miles Cycled ......... 64.52 mi

Total Elevation ............ 3807ft

* Central European Time

Tour Statistics

I decided to be extra nerdy and keep a cumulative running total of some key stats. :)

Total Miles Cycled ......... 800mi!! Approximately :) 

Total Elevation ............ 40,000ft Approximately :)

I went a bit deeper on the stats analysis for the last day, and I may continue this to the trip recap blog post looking at all of the stats, by uploading the GPX data in to a few websites that create elevation profiles etc. The Strava app is nice, but the graphs it produces arent the best. I'd figured out how to get this in to CSV and then over to google sheets. I found a good one: Website: http://www.geocontext.org/publ/2010/04/profiler/en/?import=gpx that let's you upload your GPX and it will give you a CSV of your data. I plugged that data into google sheets and came up with the graph below. 

When you pull out the raw summary stats it actually has us going down hill a bit more than uphill. Compared to other days, this one was quite easy due to the distance and we actually finished the earliest all trip. It was the first day we completed the route while the sun was still up. A 6.94mph average speed is pretty funny, but this includes all stops etc., as if the clock never stopped ticking. Avg moving speed was actually pretty good.

Distance:	64.52 mile		Average speed:	6.94 mph
Total ascent:	3807 ft		Avg. moving speed:	9.70 mph
Total descent:	3848 ft		Maximum speed:	35.50 mph
Total time:	9:17:59.0		Moving time:	6:37:39.0

12 days in and the food choices are weighing on someone :)

why doesnt this cafe con leche have rice in it?

Shruti has come to be less than enamored with the golden arches.. Bah dah dah doo doo ... not lovin' it :)

come and knock on our doooooooor

GAS STATION GOODNESS

The Cheetos stock went up 10% while we were in
Spain from an unusual surge of European demand

Vanilla Spanish Oreos

After a series of stops for food and I think I had a flat going through this underpass of glass shards, we had a road side stop and had the rock of Gibraltar on our left. It was super cool seeing it from the road as we had climbed to the top previously. Looking back after these few months not only was the ride and elevations that much more of an achievement, but seeing the rock and climbing to the top was also one of those things you will probably do once in your life, if that. 

Da Rock!

All of that cycling makes you hungry - so we stopped at a local supermarket and perused the pork products. I dont think there is another country in the world who loves to eat pork as much as people do in Spain. [ i wasnt complaining :) ]

The people of Spain love their ham

someone loves her juice 

Argentine Empanada 

post food selfie ... spirits are running high :)

extreme neck stretching

pic doesn't really capture how nice the sea looked from the mountain

nothing says nerd like an action camera strapped to your helmet

After all of the climbing... the downhill in to Tarifa was just fantastic.

The video below is one of my faves of the whole trip. At around min 5 or so we are coming down off the mountain and passing a giant wind farm. It is just amazing. I love it

We made it. The whole day all came together and ended up being the perfect mix. The mileage was a nice length, we made it during daylight, we had an amazing climb and an amazing descent, we had about 15 flats where my dad rolled down the hill on his rim [ el flato will not be denied! ], we had a nice lunch at the super mercado, Tarifa is just an amazing town and the bridge over to the lighthouse island with the crashing waves on one side, wind surfers on the other, the spray of water hitting us during a Spanish sunset at the southernmost point of Europe. It was like we were in a movie. Really amazing and really sad. A year of planning, 2 weeks of cycling, great memories coming to an end. During these long distance cycling trips with hardships and highs and more highs because of the exercise, great friends and crazy times and then after the trip it is a big crash [ at least for me ].

The last 2.5 cinematic mins of our journey coming to an end. 

Our time in Tarifa was getting a nice coffee on the beach, watching the sunset, taking selfies and bike selfies and starting our ride back north. Tomorrow will be a ride all the way back up to Barcelona. Shruti and Matt leaving us and me and dad doing a tour of Barcelona... Also lots of speeding tickets await us. and Spanish Burger King pit stops  :)

Finito!! First selfie after we arrived.

Shruts was trying as best as she could... it was so windy... #flagproblems

Facing the lighthouse in Tarifa.

Tarifa was absolutely amazing - we should have spent a day there

We have 5 bikes in the trunk!

DB 4EVA ... well at least for 2 of the 4 :)

still got some hops in those legs :)