A Spanish Secondment

After finishing University I have always wanted to do a bicycle tour of some description. I originally setting my sights on the Netherlands, but as I improved as a cyclist and visiting Spain numerous times (Girona, Mallorca) I set myself the challenge of doing a trip there instead, hopefully improving my painfully basic Spanish along the way.

The general gist of this trip was to fly somewhere with my bicycle, and slowly work my way around to a certain area. Being intersted in cities, I wanted to tour stay in as many a possible along the way. I had a wealthy chunk of time available after leaving my position of a Cloud Infrastructure engineer at Booking.com. It felt time for a new change after our containerisation project there was a success. The other elephant in the room was my desire relocate to London. The stars had aligned and I was unable to make further excuses about why I was not moving down for a length of time.

For this trip I decided it best to start in Carcassonne, in the south of France. The end point was scheduled as Seville, in the south-east of Spain.

The planning of the route was basic, and done with the use of Google Maps and it’s ‘lists’ which I will discuss in the future. There was a plan to travel to cycling hotspots and unshackle my belongings from my bicycle. There were certain cycling paradises that I wanted to sample, which came out as Andorra, Girona and Calpe. Here I would stop for a few days to tackle some of the climbs.

Additionally to cycling hotspots I had certain areas on my list to visit, the Pyrenees in general are absolutely stunning, and so riding through them became a requirement. As was visiting historical cities within Spain, such as Ronda, Murcia, Tarifa and Cadiz. Furthermore, there were heaps of national parks which I had never heard of, but after some research (aka searching once on Google Images), all looked stunning.

My experience with long distance touring was very lacking, having only enjoyed a weekend of riding with panniers a few times, so this expedition was to be an experience. Camping too was something that I had only indulged in a handful of times, so the idea of camping with a Bivvy bag was a cause for slight anxiety.

And so it was that the loose plan was erected and I would be cycling from Carcassonne to Seville. There would be lots to learn, overcome and see during the next two months. I aim to post here about what I learnt, major events, and any advice for people looking to tour in the future.

Further, you can follow day by day anecdotes via Instagram:

https://instagram.com/straybike