Day 1,560

Ironman

The following day we rode to Girona, just a morning's ride, so we would have time to explore the old city area. We were just about there when the sky filled with some ominous looking rain clouds. So on with our jackets, well yes for Tom, mine was nowhere to be found. Clearly the Dali Museum had messed with my mind, I'd left it in the hotel. We have a routine of checking before we leave anywhere, but it's clearly not working as so far since our return to the road I have donated to various chambermaids, my down jacket, my new headphones, and now my expensive waterproof. Fortunately Girona and Figueres are linked by train, so I dumped my bike and kit in a hotel foyer with Tom, and dashed off to the train station. 3 hours later I was back in Girona with my jacket, but too tired to explore the city. Tom devised a cycle route through the main sites and with an extra early start we got to see a fair bit. 

Some of Girona that we got to see

We made our way back to the coast, the sun stayed with us and just a few days later we reached the seaside town of Calella, a few miles from Barcelona and the end of our cycling in Europe, for now.

We had stopped here for a very special reason. Every year in the first weekend of October, Calella hosts the Barcelona Ironman. No, Tom hadn't decided to enter on a fully loaded tourer, but his son Jim had, on a racing bike! Jim has spent the last year training for this event, a 2.4 mile sea swim, 112 mile bike ride, and then with a full 26.2 mile marathon to finish. He’s a Mutton, a chip off the old block, so obviously he did it. With his wife Ellise we spent the day dashing about cheering him and 3,000 other competitors on. A fellow Brit won it, which added to our enjoyment.

Tom has been struggling with foot pain over the last few months (well his whole life really), and perhaps inspired by the Ironman and a secret desire to get back to marathon running, he went to see a podiatrist while we were here, Podologia Calella. The wonderful Dr Merce Martin Vizuete carried out a comprehensive assessment of his feet and took some 3D casts to make a pair of insoles to try and help his severe supination and messed up posture. They are so far feeling good, but the marathon running will have to wait!

A happy and slightly straighter standing Tom

After a day's rest and celebration with Jim and Ellise, we said our goodbyes and we headed to the airport, with our bikes and possessions packed up in 6 boxes. The flight went well for the first couple of hours but then the dreaded Captain’s announcement “is there a doctor on board?”. Fortunately there was, and the poor chap who had taken ill received some treatment and we were able to continue on without returning to Barcelona. 

We are now in Bolivia, staying in El Alto, just above La Paz, taking a few days to acclimatise seeing as we haven’t cycled here from sea level, getting used to the altitude as we go. At 4,150 metres oxygen is a little thin and when we arrived and stepped out of the airplane we immediately felt decidedly dodgy. Hopefully in a couple of days we will start to breathe a little better and the headache from hell will have gone.

Then it will be onwards towards the, hopefully still dry, Uyuni salt flats, the largest salt flats in the world. It’s going to be tough, cold, with lots of wild camping in bleak wind-blown landscapes, where food and water are hard to source. We are a bit nervous but very excited at the same time. 

The cycling through Europe, Türkiye and Georgia over the last few months has been fantastic, but we increasingly felt something was missing. After much contemplation we realised that ‘The Line’ meant more to us than we realised, and now we are back where we broke it in July last year, we feel somehow more settled. Whether we can connect it up to Tbilisi eventually, only time will tell.

One of the bikes being loaded, everything was there when we landed, which is always a huge relief