What do I remember?

Gravel paths. Spectacular scenery. Numb hands. Mesh Intercom connected. Plenty of stroopkoeken. The most low ceilings I've ever encountered. And a huge heap of fun.

This is a story of our bike trip last week, four-and-a-bit days of cycling between Girona and Perpignan.

The clock rang 2 years since our last adventure, so Prudhvi proposed that it was time to set off once again, to find a new pair of wheels and explore another corner of the Old World. I couldn't wait. I'd had enough of the flatlands around Amsterdam, where the unrelenting walls of air provide all the resistance of the Alps but none of the gratification.

In total we spent 4 days in the saddle, plus one short ride at the beginning to shake out the equipment and our legs. A rest day in the middle and a day extra at the beginning and end padded out the total duration to a full week.

Setting the scene

I'm not sure when exactly we chose Girona as the starting point, but it must have been early in our discussion. I'd been there once before on a day trip when I visited Barcelona back in 2022 (for a half, yes, goes without saying). Girona's position between the historical Spanish and French empires brought countless battles to its walls and earned it the name "city of a thousand sieges." Spending any time on cycling forums or Youtube will give you the impression that there's a new siege happening now. I already knew that Girona catered to cyclists, but nothing prepared me for the magnitude of cycling activity in the city. The siege is over, and we have taken over.

The city, capital of the eponymous province and home to 100,000 inhabitants, is surrounded by a buffet of paved and unpaved routes. As with most of my bike planning these days, I used cycle.travel as a starting point. I oriented the map north, pointing the path towards the Pyrenees. It's one of the two most popular directions for rides starting from the city, the other being east towards the Costa Brava. I craved the mountains, so that was our main goal, but we also didn't miss out on the sea.

For much of the trip, especially the first couple of days, we shared paths with the Pirinexus, a signposted mostly-gravel loop around the peaks and foothills of the mountain range. In Catalan, the range is called Pirineus, and it shapes the identity of the region once you're a little away from the coast. We noticed the Piri-prefix on branding everywhere. Even cookies we bought received their name from the mountains.

Another something flat to begin with

Girona's own airport is only useful if you're flying in from the UK on Ryanair. Since that described neither of us, we arrived by way of Barcelona, Spain's second busiest airport. We spent an easy afternoon in the city and took a local train north to Girona on our second day. We'd booked our touring bikes for the week from Cycle Tours Catalonia, situated next-door to the city's train station. The friendly store manager must have seen my home address because when we told him who we were, he offered, "shall we just continue in Dutch?"

I replied with a meek "alright, I speak a little", and he, without any acknowledgement, dropped right back into English. One of these days I'll share the challenges of learning this language, even though I live in its country.

After dropping our bags off at the hotel, we hopped on our newly acquired bikes and went out for a little spin. There probably isn't really a wrong direction to leave town in, but I still think we picked the best one. We rode out to the west, following the Ter river, sometimes closer, sometimes a little farther from its waters. A week after we rode here, these same paths we took would host Europe's largest gravel event, the Traka. In fact, all of the races (100k, 200k, 300k) converge in this section, packing in over 4500 cyclists throughout the course of the event. Glad we beat the crowd!

On the approach back to the town, we crossed right through the parking lot of a giant Nescafe factory that still smelled like coffee even though it was Sunday. Later in the week we came across a coffee shop in the city center that claimed to be the only roaster in the city. Well, unless they secretly owned Nestle, I must admit I held some doubt about their claim!

Who needs bridges?

Our first real day on the road introduced us to the gravel tracks of northern Spain that for the rest of the week would become a familiar... let's say "sensation." The other introduction we got was to river fording. In the Netherlands, rivers nearing the sea sprawl out into thick, slow-moving ribbons hundreds of meters wide. Here, however, near the mountainous sources, rivers are often as small as little streams. Whoever laid down the gravel tracks must have figured they wouldn't be a problem to ford. Would you know it? They were right! And they were a lot of fun too, made it feel like a proper adventure.

The gravel was sometimes rocky, sometimes sandy, uphill and downhill, brown and yellow and red. But it was almost always gravel through this first day. However we had a brief reprieve at around the midpoint of the day, where I mapped us out to the coast to enjoy the seaside. We stopped in the town of L'Escala for our lunch. I ordered a sandwich and calamari. It reminded me of the Po'boys in New Orleans. We kicked back for a while and just soaked in the sea (in the shade, we had plenty of sun on the bikes).

One more memory just came to mind. We encountered something strange when we were leaving Girona in the morning. The path out of the city was intended to cut through a city park just south of the center, but we couldn't follow it. Instead, the park was surrounded completely by students, lined up tightly. We couldn't figure out what the reason was, but they formed an impenetrable wall. City of a thousand sieges, right?

The rest of the day reflected the earlier sections and was mostly flat. The little village of Peralada seems to treat Monday as their weekend, since not a single restaurant was open. The place we stayed at was neat. The house used to be home to a blacksmith, and the bottom floor was the former workshop. We ended up dining on a spread of Spar grocery store delicacies like yogurt and microwave potato pie. My words make it sound unappetizing. Actually, it really was delicious.

Fake.

Our second day goes onto the list. The List of Fake Places. We left early, taking advantage of the cooler temperatures and softer sun of the morning. Our route departed the town that hadn't woken up yet and dumped us back onto the familiar gravel terrain. We enjoyed the tranquility of the morning and pedaled smoothly across the country, targeting our first crossing of the Pyrenees.

A few options present themselves for this part of the route, on choosing which way to cross the political and geographical border between France and Spain. Eurovelo 8, a cross-continent cycle route, selected the flattest possible way, via La Jonquera. This was also the way of the main highway. We would have constantly been in audible range of the traffic, so I elected to draw us to a different pass, the Col de Banyuls. Plus I live in the flattest place on the continent; I don't need more of that.

The col I thus chose peaked at only 480 meters, a fairly modest height that I felt confident we'd handle even without much hill training. Most of the morning was thus spent, winding our way up the climb. The Spanish side was well-paved and well-graded, smooth and not too steep. The French side would tell a different story.

We took a break at the top, enjoying the lookout and commemorating with a photo of the sign, before continuing onward. Now in France, our next challenge was to snake across the mountainside on a chunky gravel path. Gravel comes in many forms. In Spain it had been sandy and dusty, albeit sometimes a little loose. Here, it wasn't gravel at all. It was just rocks. But we soldiered on; I knew the struggle would pay off. As a street view junkie, I'd done the research.

What the gravel path led to was one of the most breathtaking descents I'd ever experienced. The cliffside road exposed us to unobstructed views across rolling hills all the way to the shimmering Mediterranean, adorned with villages that seem to meld into the sea.

Echoing the previous day, we took lunch once again at a little seaside tourist town. The spoken language changed but the Mediterranean vibe remained. Collioure is a dense little place, with a maze of little alleys in the center. We ordered Breton galettes for lunch, both savory and sweet.

Nothing through the rest of the day could hold a candle to what we'd experienced. My memory of the approach to Perpignan contains a vague industrial impression, with many big highway crossings. Through dinner, the lack of noteworthiness continued. We had burgers for dinner, but I don't recall the taste.

Interlude

We had a rest day in Perpignan, which we spent by immediately leaving Perpignan and going into the mountains. Perhaps it'll reappear as a future post on here.

Return of the Exiles

One mountain pass down, one more to go. We would return to where we began, but that doesn't mean we had to go the same way. Our route north took a coastal slant, so our route south would slice inland.

The weather brought a tint of caution to this third day of riding. We'd originally planned about 70 kilometers again, but a yellow thunderstorm warning for the afternoon led us to cut out a little sidetrack to Céret. We left early and vectored ourselves once more at the mountains, aiming for the Col de Manrella.

The road on the French side of Col de Manrella, like the one before, terminates in a gravel path that's mostly impermeable to most vehicle traffic, not because cars can't do it but because most drivers are too scared of leaving any marks on them to attempt it. That was all the better for us as we labored up the singular mountain road, since it reduced the traffic on the road to practically non-existent.

The road terminates in the tiny little settlement of Las Illas, leading to a secret off-piste border crossing. The couple with a donkey posted at the end of this path having a picnic made me feel like a time traveler, anachronistically introducing our aluminum horses where they didn't belong.

The short gravel section (thankfully much easier to traverse than the one off of Banyuls) opened up into Spain, onto a clearing where a group of cyclists were enjoying wine and bread under a tree. The Spanish side of the Col displays a pyramid monument to Lluís Companys, who led thousands of republican refugees over that very path to escape fascism during the Spanish civil war. Companys, who had been president of Catalonia, was eventually captured and executed in Montjuïc Castle, Barcelona.

Owing to the reduced distance and the early start, we actually arrived in La Vajol quite early. The whole village housed perhaps 20 addresses. Without much to do, we spent the afternoon just relaxing and enjoying the carefree vacation calmness. The thunderstorm didn't happen.

Reflections

La Vajol stands at the top of a hill of over 500 met,ers elevation, and Girona is near sea level, so naturally the day began with a roaring, ear-popping descent down to the valley. Here in Spain, the most memorable feature of the ride for me was all the packs of cyclists that crossed our path on the roads. Most of the route eschewed the gravel from before and replaced it with asphalt, accelerating our progress.

Eventually we reached familiar territory, re-tracing the last dozen or so kilometers on the same paths we had followed when we embarked on the trip (in the other direction). The uneventful riding gave me time to reflect on the experience.

I find the attraction of bike touring difficult to convey to the uninitiated. I wax on about it forever, but it's really something that must be felt to believe. Nothing beats a view that you poured your sweat out to reach. No other kind of travel lets you devour as much and savor as sweetly all the food you desire. No other means of transport else lets you feel every undulation of the land, every change in the terrain and climate, while still covering significant distances. And best of all, there's no better feeling of fulfillment than that of a tour well done.

And here's the full map of our trip: