S2.5 - Portugal : Decision Time!

Gorgeous Portuguese beach

I've been thinking about the next bicycle tour for about a year. My friends and I had started and stopped a plan to do New Zealand, then the grand canyon came up, possibly across Canada, but nothing was solidified. We finished Spain in Jan 2018 and through out the year I did a few local cycles, did a 117mi round trip to Philly and back, did a short ride in New Hampshire, but I was itching to do something. For the last 2 years we did something big. I just couldn't not do something in January. The tour of Spain in 2018 while we were planning it in 2017 had taken on a few different shapes. One was to cycle across the peninsula from east to west, cutting across Madrid and over to Lisbon hitting two countries. About the same distance as going down the coast, but what prevented us from doing this was the cold of the Spanish interior. It is snowy in Madrid in January! So what does this have to do with January 2019, well basically I had wanted to see Portugal. I knew literally nothing of the country other than you get cork and port from there and I couldn't make heads or tails of the language. :) But also what I had seen was that the country was beautiful and there were many bike packing videos on youtube. One being better than the next. I was hooked. 


Now how do I break it to my wife and family that I wanted to go and if I had to, I would go it alone? Thankfully I didn't have to do that. I managed to convince my wife with some careful "dripping" of information, a bit of video showing here and there and then pestering her for a week if she would come with me, and I couldn't believe it - she said yes! 

I only took the bare bare minimum

Once she said yes I was all in. I put together a plan and got to work on the routes, looking at the eurovelo, sample GPX files, blogs, vlogs, tour groups - you name it I was all in. I came up with a rough sketch of the tour below. This was actually the 2nd version. The first version had us cycling 60-65miles a day with a break day. It was a much better idea to keep the daily miles lower and keep the 5 days of cycling. Mrs Steve Cycles The World hadn't been training, at all,  and the 48 or so we averaged per day was just enough of a challenge in conjunction with the terrain and elevations, where we took the whole day, had breakfast, lunch, coffee stops as well as lots and lots of video stops and snack stops - which just made the whole trip perfect and enjoyable. 

A rough sketch of the plan

Day #	Start	Finish	Miles
0	Newark Airport	Lisbon Airport	3375
1	Lisbon airport	Troia	35 - we got a taxi
2	Troia	Sines	44
3	Sines	Odeceixe	44
4	Odeceixe	Sagres	34
5	Sagres	Benagil beach	38
6	Benagil beach	Faro	35
7	Faro	Lisbon Airport -> JFK Airport	160mi driving 3357 Flying
		Total	~230 biking

Well I am getting a bit ahead of myself at this point. Next up is the logistics - planning, packing and routing in under 3 weeks!!

Tchau!!!