The European Bit

At 2pm toady i was eating my lunch in the sunshine in my shorts and flip flops, nut its not been quite so smooth.

After emotional farewells in Tunbridge Wells and London I bowled up at the docks in Portsmouth on Sunday 12th Feb to be told my ferry was cancelled due to bad weather over the Bay of Biscay. I was to either head home and wait for the next ferry in 3 days or take another crossing to France. I took the latter, arriving in St Malo, Britannny at 5am and headed south with my new biker mates i´d met on the ferry.

Within 3 miles they had shot off ahead and i found myself being buffeted across the autoroute by the very same winds that had cancelled my ferry to Bilbao. And precisely the reason i had opted to miss out France and head straight for Spain. For the first day of my trip it was roller coaster of a day both physically, due to the weather and lack of sleep, and emotionally- I was questioning my decision for doing the trip and felt deeply alone and very down about the whole adventure. This must have been a little mind tantrum as by the late afternoon the sun was out, i was on the back roads and casting long shadows over the vineyards of bordeau singing along to the Chili Peppers. The trip was good again.

I spent the night in in the lovely rambling Le Chateaux Gatte, St Andre Cubzac. A vineyard and B&B.

The following morning I had a good run through to Spain, stopping for lunch on the beach near Biaritz. The bikers round these parts liked to give me a strange below salute as they rode past. Is this a local kind of ¨hello fellow biker¨, a respect to amount of crap i´m carrying or disrespecting the my low speed and British number plates. I took it to be former and waved back.

Now i left my Spanish ¨Roughguide¨ which i was relying on for the language section at the back in England, so whilst Spain got warmer, especially as i descended on to the Med coast, i found i was embarrassingly lacking on the language side. I persevered on cervaza and cafe negro and arrived at Dad´s yesterday very hungry!

As you can see below (photo by Dad) the weather here is perfect, and i´m finishing off the bike jobs that did´t get done in the UK-i.e. changing the fork oil and renewing the clutch cable.