Jane says, "Have you seen my hubris around?" Girona Gravel-Cation '26

My head is still swimming and will probably continue to swim for awhile.

Up front, I want to thank Burke Burkentstein for planning the trip, or to put it better, coming up with the concept of a plan as no actual "plan" to ride bikes in Spain can be made unless you are entirely flexible and prepared to modify said "plan" every few minutes or so.

I also wanna thank Bill Nye and Dr Mike for being willing to constantly pivot and adapt to the ever-changing... "schedule?"  

There will be no consistent timeline established as I just babble on and on about our trip to Girona (and also Costa Brava and Barcelona).  I will spit out the positives and negatives as they come to mind.

First and most foremost, the quality of the riding was off the charts.  For the most part.  Some of the coolest gravel and sometimes trails but unfortunately we had some bush-whacking and riding on the side of a very busy highway.  We rode two days around Girona, pulled an overnighter to Costa Brava, and went on my favorite ride all week before hopping on a high speed choo choo to be tourists in Barcelona for a day.

I didn't know intimate massage was a thing in Barcelona until I was eyeballed pretty hard by an individual in a particular "come hither" manner, saw a naked man down a hallway, and then finally googled it.  Okay then.  I was more interested in the €8 hair cuts, but I figured with the language barrier, there was no way I was gonna end up looking better than the walking shit show I currently am.

I hope that one day, the Barcelona airport figures out the whole "passport/eye scan/queue/better pee before you get in line/is anyone in charge here?" thing.  Dr Mike and I had made it through the security screening, bought coffee and got yelled at for empty cups at the passport checkpoint even though there was nowhere to dispose of them.

Why are all the toilets square and engineered in such a manner that shit just sticks to the backside completely unaffected by the what seemed to be an ample flow of water?  Mebbe it was just my body's inability to process Tapas and seven tiny cups of daily coffee into anything other than roofing tar in aerosol form.

Old Town Girona was crazy town.  So historical.  So nifty.  So many places closed on any random day (or days) regardless of what Google tells you.  Finding something to eat was a daily adventure, and finding good beer was an epic quest.  There was a place that we had sought out night after night finally opening on our penultimate evening in Girona, and one person ran it all.  Took our orders, brought us our beer, and made all of our tiny plates of food stuffs.  One person.  All in a place the size of a shoe box.

Clothing optional beaches only served to open my mind.  Here we are, just sentient (by our own definition) specks in the universe, and we humans decided to invent clothes and also shame, deciding to be the only living creatures that hides body parts from each other that we all know we have.

People make living wages in the service industry.  It's like... huh?  How did we not figure that out here?

I like being around and in the company of people who smoke cigarettes.  I guess that just brings back fond memories of my dad, bars in college, and America in the '90s in general.  

We rode outta Girona proper four times in four different directions.  A few ding dongs on bikes trying to follow the dots on their computer screens whilst obeying traffic laws and attempting to follow established traffic patterns.  It was an exercise in "pack your patience pants" that was always rewarded once things got more rural (except for those "fun" moments returning to home base on highway C66, especially in high crosswinds). 

Now, peekshurs (some mine, some not).

That's right... my fucking restaurant, and I'll open it any day and any hour I choose, and I will close it if I see you even looking at it with even loose to moderate interest.

Bill Nye watering a compacted compressed tablet towel, I think... although I don't know if wash cloths exists in Spain since we got zero of them in our Air BnB.

You leave all the food options in the main concourse before going through a lengthy passport check when leaving the Barcelona airport and get stuck with giant bags of Kit Kats and a €25 pack of meat in vending machines for your lunch options.

This is a bike shop where you can buy $10k+ bikes that the baggage handlers can destroy on your trip home.

Art, I guess.

The boys went on a tour of the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia that's currently still being built and was designed in 1883 by a creative 8th grader who lived and also fever dreamed Dungeons & Dragons while watching Game of Thrones and snorting Ritalin that his older brother gave him.

I had to kill time while they were touring, so I wandered around the city exchanging money for beer and bathroom access and googling Barcelona sex work trying to solve a mystery.

These pull down doors are in front of every storefront to let you know that a place was closed and also might open some day but probably not during the hours you're there.

I got to dive into a place to watch the final kilometers of a stage of La Vuelta.  I shared the excitement with a man who was one hundred years old who had been writing his memoirs in small spiral bound notebooks.  He taught me how to poop in square toilets, so we are now pen pals.

The guys said this was a some hundreds of years old bar that Hemmingway and also Dali used to frequent.  This is also where Hemmingway first thought of the phrase "for a good time call..." and scribbled it on the bathroom wall.

I'm sure I was either expressing my joy of finding a place that was open or venting my frustration that an "open" place was closed.

Naps were more or less succumbing to exhaustion more than a planned period of rest.

I found this hat in our coastal apartment and decided this was who I was from now on.  Then I woke up and realized I had no idea how I would bring my new lifestyle back with me, so I left it for a future traveler.

I think the guys took this photo on a daily basis.

Chuggles or Chuggies... an actual craft beer bottle shop that was open once and hidden from anyone who sought it out with less than 100% intention and a strong American desire to drink an IPA.

I'm not tired.  You're tired.  Yeth, I brought shirts with sleeves in case we went somewhere fancy.

So, yeah.  Dr Mike discovered a crack in his seat stay before our last ride.  Photos from earlier in the week proved that the airline did this, but to be fair, they broke the other seat stay on the way home making things nicely symmetrical. 

One of the spots that was randomly open on a ride that wasn't really supposed to head this way but it did.

Burke learning the art of washing a bike in the apartment shower that let water flow freely and regularly into the master bedroom with the door shut.  At least they provided a mop and bucket.

Monster Energy drink?  Check.  Condoms?  Check.  Boner pills?  Check.  Blinkie butt plugs (for your safety)?  Obvs, check.

The first clothing optional beach we rolled up on during our coastal journey.  I thought I took the photo from a respectful distance, but my new phone camera was better than I thought.  Hopefully blogger compresses this appropriately.  

Bike lane by the naked people beach after a two beer lunch stop.

If you've seen Catch 22, this image has a real brothers in arms love feels.

We lucked out and someone bailed on their reservations at some restaurant that is ran outta some old boat captain's former house, and this was our dinner view.  The captain's name was not Ron, but for us, it was.

Some place we found that wasn't closed and was willing to stay open late because we like exchanging money for beer and bathrooms.

When it doubt, walk... until a motorcycle, car, or garbage truck drives along the tiny street that designed for horse drawn conveyances.  Probably still walk, lest ye get a ticket from one of the most beautiful police officers you've ever seen.

One of the few places we found that did not serve Tappas.

They grow some kind of trees outside Girona that need swamps to thrive.  This tractor is a water pump and the second biggest tourist attraction in Girona that's not a bridge.

First night at the apartment, and a bunch of grown men threw their dirty laundry... into the dryer.

First mechanical of the week... a non-functioning power meter.  Came direly close to ending the whole trip.

A point a half mile from the top of the first biggest climb of the whole trip, and where decisions had to be made and expectations scaled back by reality.  16% climbs rise faster than the price of diesel.

I think we were in a mall and looking for the Pinocchio store to turn right through to get to the food court.

Pretty sure none of us had done a dry run of fitting AND packing our bags for the overnighter (tags still attached to the bags here).  No matter how unprepared everyone else was, pretty sure I was the biggest fail.

I forgot the my Topeak frame bag did not fit with large bottles... and I brought zero regular bottles.  Then the USWE bag that I ran once came outta my travel bag with a broken strap.  I ended up filling all my pockets, stuffing the USWE pack with the barest of essentials, securing it with a zip tie (later), and strapping my flip flops, shorts, and t-shirt to my handlebars.

I didn't die, and I was able to brush my teeth and charge my phone.

Not the last time we would encounter stairs on our "route."

The only carpet fiber bike to make the whole trip unscathed.

This was a literal traffic jam on the way back to Girona from the sea.  I told him to get on the sidewalk.

From doo doo laden farm fields that almost rattled the flip flops from their semi-secure location...

to a highway where there was zero chance that semis going 90kph could give us the 1.5m of safe space unless we crawled into our own assholes (I did).

This was before we gave up on riding down a trail not trail that was littered with detritus and the scattered hopes and dreams of all the riders that came before us.

On our way to a high speed train to Barcelona on a quest to find more sun burn and beer that wasn't Estrella.

I had the most excellent time.  There is a talk of doing something like this annually, and once I get over the travel anxiety of it all, I'll probably book my flights and practice saying hello, thank you, and beer in some other language.