Fifteen days after we left the south of Spain it was assaulted by the most devastating flood in Europe’s recent history. More than 200 people died. Thousands more were injured, lost their homes, and their livelihood. This blog series is dedicated to those whose lives are forever changed. I hope my portrayal of the incredible Andalusian landscapes and culture encourages you to discover its wonder for yourself. Go spend your tourism dollars there and help recover a country in need.

Incase you missed the fist blog in this series, you can read it here.

Day 1 (of 7)

Destination: Benalua Distance: 97km, elevation gain: 2080meters, surface: 62% unpaved

We woke having to adjust our intentions for the day. Our first day in the saddle was big, and we were unsure how long it would take to reach our next hotel. Plus we ran out of time the previous night to test ride the bikes and gear for any unseen airline damage. What we intended was an early start, giving us the most possible daylight hours for riding. But what we did was fall asleep having wrongly assumed the combination of jet lag and nervous anticipation would guarantee a restless night and inevitable early morning, so we chose not to set an alarm. That was unfortunate. I opened my eyes at 8:16am. Flocon de neige! Why did we assume that? We had a long day ahead of us and just gifted ourselves less daylight hours to complete it (but as a bonus, at least we slept)! Worst case scenario, we had brought bike lights for any unintended riding in the dark. Actually, WORST case scenario we each brought a bivy sack and some warm clothes on the off chance we needed to spend the night somewhere in the desert (spoiler alert, it never came to that, but at one point we almost resorted to climbing into the bivy sacks).

Breakfast at the hotel exceeded all expectations. We were greeted with fresh cappuccinos, rice pudding, homemade breads and pastries garnished with fruit grown right on the property. We pinched a few treats including some orange nut loaf and traditional Spanish potato tortilla (the latter of which I was particularly excited about). These were going to be a welcome reprieve from the mountain of candy we would be ingesting throughout the day. With our five-finger discount snacks stashed away in our panniers, we were finally packed and ready to ride by 10am, more than an hour later than we had intended.

Navigating our way out of Granada went quite smooth. Spanish drivers are remarkably courteous to cyclists, slowing to pass and giving a wide berth. We exited the main city streets onto a narrow, steep pedestrian path. This was our first exposure to the Morrish style architecture that would become a familiar navigation puzzle through the small towns we visited. The houses are built tall, with no gaps, in seemingly random clusters, creating winding paths so narrow it felt like we were riding across everyone’s front door steps. It was more of a vertical maze than a bike path. I later learned this style of urban planning was historically used as an intentional defence mechanism by Islamic cultures. The labyrinthine of tall homes on narrow streets with sharp turns made it difficult for large groups of attackers to navigate, giving the defenders the upper hand in an ambush. We wove our way high out of Granada, past the Alhramba, the iconic Moorish fortress built in 1238 during the Nasrid Dynasty (we planned a visit on our last day in Granada), and were rewarded with some breathtaking views of the city.

These grand views of the Sierra Nevada mountain range and Granada city were the first of many stunning lookouts sprinkled throughout our days in the saddle. We were breathless from the assent, but ecstatic to be reminded where we were in the world, and how high we had already climbed, until Care Bear spoiled it by pointing out we had only reached 200/2080m for the day.

The first 30km covered most of the day’s heavy lifting, accumulating 1450 of the 2080 meters to our next accommodation.

During the only paved section of that first 30km climb, we ran into a few road cyclists. They noticed our panniers and inquired as to where we were headed. Between the language barrier and me forgetting the name of the town we were staying in, I told them something that was a bit of guess but sounded right, sure only that the town started with the letter “B”. I said we were headed to Belencia. Belencia, is not a place. Valencia is a town 400km further than we actually ended the day. They were very impressed. One guy told us to slow down. We were super proud (we didn’t realize my mistake until after we arrived at our hotel).

We climbed for hours, into protected areas, on roads not passable by cars, past two separate organized events, one of which was a trail run and the other a mountain bike race, finally reaching the top of the world, eager to descend. We were tired from the hours of grinding upward, exhausted from the jet lag, and caked with a layer of dirt and sweat from dusty, arid roads. It’s hard to put into words the thrill of dropping down after that first climb. Long descents are the yin to the cycling yang, the order to chaos, heaven to hell. After enduring multiple hours of continual climbing, a descent is euphoric. We dropped for nearly 18km. The ecstasy coming down that mountain will undeniably remain a life highlight. The road was firm packed, pristine white gravel, tracing us along the mountain pass, and affording us the most brilliant views.

This amusement park level of fun ended us at a small town, and just in time as I was starting to hit a wall. We were testing how to fuel our bodies for long rides in the desert heat, and we were bound to make mistakes. Mistake number one was not consuming enough electrolytes with our water, and I could feel the familiar, heavy disorientation that occurs when I screw up my nutrition. We stopped at a small town gas station diner for a bottle of Coke and some salt to add to our water bottles. The locals were confused and slightly put off by the ‘sal’ request for our water, but thankfully obliged. These two nutrition tweaks made a huge difference. I was once again feeling good, and just in time for more climbing! With a sugar high and a caffeine rush, we weaved our way higher, through some beautiful tiny towns.

The high lasted long enough to pull us through one more amazing moment, a long, paved descent through a red rock valley at low sun.

The good feelings stopped there. It was 5pm and somehow the hottest part of the day. We had a steep, 20% graded climb that quickly turned into an insufferable one kilometre long hike-a-bike section. But it did thankfully end at the best lookout.

At this point we were getting anxious to get off the bikes and devour some real food (a day ingesting only Coke and candy sounds like fun, and to be honest it is, but eventually your teeth start to hurt and you crave something with more substance). We had just 10 km left before our next hotel. It felt so close. I can run that distance in under an hour, we should be there in like 20-30 minutes right? Wrong! Just as I thought the worst part of the day was over (I could taste the burger), we drop into a horrible chunky, loose, deep gravel disaster descent. We walked the better part of 5km. This was SOUL CRUSHING!!! To be only 10km from the finish, but potentially hours away, walking our weighed down bikes through technical and steep terrain in our stupid clipless bike shoes, in the stupid desert heat could take days, maybe years. The outlook was bleak. I was wrecked.

As we approached the last interesting feature of the day, a tall rock chasm with a narrow channel, I made sure my suffering was acknowledged “this would be really cool if I wasn’t so miserable.” Care Bare made sure it was documented.

We finally reached Benelua, weaving through the town to arrive at our hotel at 6:30pm, right on time to meet the single hotel staff who pulled up in his car to unlock the doors and check us in. This should have been a hint to how remote we were. He told us to just leave our bikes in the hotel lobby because no-one else was crashing there that night. He then threw us the keys to the hotel entrance and told us to lock up when we left. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As we settled into our room, I opened one of my panniers to find the inside of it covered in dust. Weird. How did the inside get so dusty? Is there a hole already? This is a brand-new system for me, and I tested it on a few rides before we left Canada to check weight and get familiar with its use. There were no problems on those rides. I cleaned it up and filled it with water to see if there was a leak somewhere. Nope. So what’s all this fine, white powder? I dug around the contents and noticed the powder was most concentrated in our medication bag. I had packed a random assortment of probable pharmacalogical necessities, and a couple of IMODIUM tablets had ironically exploded everywhere, covering the entire contents of the bag with a layer of IMODIUM dust, including the remaining medication. Now every pill included a light dusting of IMODIUM. This was both entertaining and potentially useful? This could become the next adventure lifestyle hack. Pass the Imodium coated Advil please.

We dug into our remaining snacks, attempting to top up our depleted energy systems while we cleaned up and did the day’s laundry in the bathroom sink. Time to dig into our contraband of bread and potato tortilla! I was practically salivating thinking of that potato tortilla while I washed a small sand dune out of my hair. I came out of the shower to find a very apologetic Care Bear and no potato tortilla. In a hypoglycimic tizzy of snacks and gear she grabbed what she thought was a piece of bread and shoved the potato tortilla into her mouth. She knew her mistake instantly, but thought better of spitting it out and handing it off to me withholding the aforementioned detail. I was ultimately glad deductive reasoning brought her to this conclusion, but we thought it was funny this could even be a consideration. How much hunger does it take to make consuming food that spent time in another person’s mouth a preferred outcome to not eating at all? Luckily we had not yet reached that point. And there was enough orange nut loaf to tide me over until dinner. She still owes me a tortilla :)

We ate dinner at a nearby restaurant, sharing a beer and a couple of local dishes. I ate a plate full of tomatoes. We laughed at our adventures from the day. It felt like we had already come so far and seen so much, yet we had only ridden for a single day. Before we left the restaurant, we purposefully confirmed a breakfast place for the morning, the next day being Sunday and the Spanish being infamous for upholding the Christian sabbath.

We let ourselves back into the hotel, our bikes remaining dutifully in the front entrance. We searched around for a good spot to hang out and stretch. Finding a large balcony, we brought out some blankets from our room and ran through the mobility program I had designed specifically for this trip (details below if you want to check out the full program). We ended with our feet up the hotel wall, looking at a perfectly clear starry sky, amazed with how much we had already seen, anticipating what was yet to come.

Today’s Shout Out goes to our partners Will and Chris for allowing us to carry out these grandiose ideas while having absolutely no interest in participating themselves.

Animal count:

One guy riding a horse on the MTB trails

2 cows

1 small deer (we learned later this was an ibex)

Weird looking fox

Herd of goats complete with bells

A single butterfly stalking along behind Care Bear

For those interested in the nerdy bikepacking details, our bike computer numbers at the end of the day read 100km and 2243m elevation, 3km further and 164m higher than predicted by the ever optimistic Ride With GPS (we eventually learned not to be too attached to the numbers as it was easy to get excited about being done the day’s projected elevation only to turn a corner and be faced with several hundred additional meters of steep climbing).

Prior to leaving Canada, I had messaged a few people who had previously ridden The Badlands gravel route and received some useful recommendations and expectations. One person told me to anticipate riding around 13-15km/hour (significantly slower than our typical 20-23km/hour at home). Today we were right on target, traveling at 13.5 km/h with an additional 1.5h for pictures, eating, talking to locals, and figuring out gear (more on our gear and set up in future blogs). We took two large 24oz bottles of water plus an additional 2L of water packed in a bladder since we were traveling through the desert and didn’t know if we could count on water sources in small towns during off peak tourist season. I used all this water before we stopped at that gas station around the 66km mark, and was still quite dehydrated by the end of the day. I had a pounding headache and noticed my heart rate wasn’t dropping as much as I would expect, which is why I felt the need to salt my water. The salt water, though slightly off putting, worked to drop my heart rate. It didn’t help my headache which was more likely positional from a long day riding drop bars. I had accounted for this probable stiffness in our mobility program, and included some thoracic and shoulder stretches. It was an easy sell to spend 20 minutes doing mobility at the end of the day as it helped mitigate muscle soreness and down regulate our nervous systems before we slept.

Until next time, thanks for reading!

Here’s a screen shot of our program.

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