Spain: Swimming Upstream

On our first full day in Spain, we arrived bright eyed to our next planned campground, only to find a padlock on the gate. Odd, but a human-sized hole in the fence told us it was actually open to those brave enough to enter, at least I think that’s what that meant. Inside was a sprawling, chaotic squatter city of caravans and tarps that apparently never got the memo it was closed. Well, there was no one there except us — we hoped. We decided to join the anarchy and sleep in our private campground under the main pavilion roof, and by sunrise we had witnessed a deer get chased by a boar and been nearly startled to death by the world's most aggressive “BUENOS DIAS” from a passing car.

Spain was nothing like we expected.

Our palace of a private campground pavilion. Shame I missed the picture of the caravans.

The mental image I had of Spain before this trip was one of sun soaked beaches, midnight tapas bars, dancing, tourists, and the famous (infamous) siesta partaking locals. The experience that we actually got was anything but all of that - except maybe everything being closed pretty much all the time for adult nap time ( which seemed to span most of the daylight hours ). Instead, we got dusty pilgrimage towns, wind and rain storms, beautiful verdant mountains, and a lot of terrain that reminded me a lot of Colorado, our home, and some terrain that oddly reminded me of driving across Kansas to visit my grandmother. When on the Camino de Santiago, we encountered many a pilgrim on their trek to Santiago de Compostela, but outside of that, we got wide-eyed stares from the locals as we must have been the only foreign tourists they have seen in their town in months. Though once, it was us doing the staring. While crossing the vast Spanish plains, miles from the nearest town, we came up behind a man in a power wheelchair - outfitted, somehow, with a soft top conversion - riding directly down the center of the road. Two massive semi trucks barreled down the road coming right behind him. We watched in horror from a distance. He did not move. He did not acknowledge them. No one honked. Eventually, as if this were perfectly normal, the trucks just went around him and continued on their way. We have absolutely no idea where he came from or where he was going, and at this point, we've accepted that we never will.

Western Spain was full of surprises. Full of odd characters, amazingly remote landscapes, and many smiles.

Surely this wheelchair is highway legal

Camino, or Colorado?

As a whole, northern Spain is much lesser known than the very popular cities dotting the Mediterranean coast. It’s mostly known for the aforementioned Camino de Santiago, which is actually a collection of well worn paths from various parts of Spain and beyond that all end up in Santiago. Heading eastward out of Portugal, jumping between the Portuguese Camino routes and the Camino Frances, it turns out that we were most certainly going the wrong way. Well, the right way towards Germany, but the complete opposite way from the hundreds, if not thousands of pilgrims we encountered along the way. Every passing smile and every cheery Alberque owner chanted at us, “Bien Camino!!” as we passed, and often we were asked if we were collecting stamps on our way to Compostela, or where we had started from and how long. We didn’t have the heart to tell them that we were not going to Santiago, or that we started, mostly at random, from Porto, Portugal; not anywhere particularly relevant to the Camino. It certainly felt like a unique way to experience this iconic pilgrimage route.

The famous Burgos Cathedral - an iconic stop on the Camino.

See? The plains can be pretty too.

Leaving Portugal, I was dreaming of the delicious food…well, I’m not sure what food I was expecting from Spain. Tacos? I’m pretty sure that was a Mexican invention. All I knew was the existence of tapas bar hopping, but never knew what the tapas actually was. Well, as it turns out, we never found this out. The Spaniards have an impressive habit of staying up obscenely late, and never being in quite the hurry to do anything in the morning. While this came in handy for biking on roads with little traffic in the early hours, it also meant that we had little to no chance of finding any food for sale before about 1 PM. The hours on Google were a suggestion at best, and the business just didn’t exist anymore at worst. What I thought was an actual desert across the middle of Spain was actually just a food desert, there was plenty of greenery, just not the gluttonous gastronomy that our tired legs were craving.

One day we just gave up and splurged at the first supermarket we found in days.

To combat this, I deployed my ever-amazing partner, Francesca. While I can understand a fair bit of Spanish (accent depending), Francesca has a near-native level ability to actually speak the language, so instead of relying on our impressively useless mapping apps, we decided that the best strategy was to corner the first person we found in each town, and plead with them to tell us which store might actually be willing to serve us a few meager bocadillos at regular human lunch hours. With this plan in place, we did manage to usually secure a regular dried ham and cheese sandwich each day, usually with some orange or peach juice to stave off the scurvy.

Another interesting thing to note is the Spanish obsession with hamburgers. I think every single food serving establishment we went to proudly offered a hamburger as their shining deal, with the menu almost built around it as an afterthought. Always on the picture was a massive steak slapped onto a huge brioche bun — the American dream food. In actuality, the burger was almost always just a chicken sandwich served on some sort of baguette bread, which I was happy about as this was much more conducive food for a mid-ride lunch on the ol’ stomach.

An possibly related photo of one of the 15 slugs on our tent this morning. Have I mentioned I am hungry?

Our favorite part of Spain, however, was at the far eastern end - the Basque Country. This area is defined by the impressive Cantabrian mountains, lush forests from constant Atlantic showers, a fascinating language and history, and countless wine vineyards. Some of the best riding of our lives was in the beautiful hills surrounding the cities of Haro and Vitoria-Gasteiz, and we met some of the most wonderful people. Everyone here was eager to help, to make us feel like friends, and to encourage us on our journey. Even though we deviated from the Camino for this section, we got many cheers, “Bien Viaje!”’s, and claps from random strangers that had no idea where we were going or where we came from, but just happy and excited to see a couple of ragged Americans struggling fully loaded up through some small hillside town.

Glorious mountains. I will never complain about going uphill again after the plains.

Our final ride in Spain was fantastic, crossing the Pyrenees into Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the traditional start of the Camino Frances. After seeing how amazing the Pyrenees was on our crossing, we can’t wait to ride east along its flank, and maybe even tackle some of the famous passes further down in France in the coming weeks!

Wine Country!