The first taste of spain

In 1909 my great grandfather made the thousand plus mile journey from Vienna to London on foot. Along the way he wrote alot of postcards home, when he got back to london he collected these postcards into a book called "The Diary Of A Tramp". Its 2012 and its time for travelling, this blog will be my postcards home. I havent really got much of an idea of what im going to do out there or how long im going to be out there for but im going to try and have fun and learn as many things as I can. For those of you reading this blog who don't know im going to be cycling around Spain to see all there is to see.

As I got on the ferry from Portsmouth to Santander on a Tuesday a brief "what the fuck am I doing" feeling flickered over me, but it passed quickly as I remembered exactly what I was doing. I met some lovely people on the ferry; Felix who it turned out was doing pretty much the same thing as me, Lee a guy heading down to Orgiva in a converted Horse box who gave me and Felix 50 euros and Sam an english teacher in Zaragoza. Me and Felix decided to travel together to a permacultural farm in portugal. We landed in santander in the evening and decided to rough it for that night, for packing I had worked on the basis that Spain was a hot country all of the time. It turns out I was wrong.

I had come horribly underprepared, all I brought was a sleeping bag, bike tools, not enough clothes and swimming trunks. As we cycled west out of santander that first night, it was an amazing first taste of spain, still nice and warm in the evening and surrounded by smells of orange and lemon blossoms cycling in and out of quiet - apart from the constant barking of dogs everytime we rode near - villages looking for somewhere to sleep. We started up a big hill and it started pissing it down, about half an hour in and we realised it was set in for the night. We found a little wooded bit of the side of a hill and prepared for our first night. Luckily Felix had a waterproof sheet which he chucked over me and he had a self adapted survival bag so we were kind of ok untill about 3 in the morning when the sheet must of blown off of me and I woke absolutly soaked.

That first night as it turned out was to set the premise for our first couple of weeks, the amount of emotional highs and lows that we went through each day in our never ending search for warmth, food and shelter were ridiculous. Going from being rained on constantly to seeing amazing spanish villages and towns spralled out in front of us in the sun was both breath taking and emotionally wearing. Despite the never ending rain we stayed optimistic, I remember having heard that rainfall and clouds get stopped by mountains so we headed south towards the mountains of cantabria and what I thought would be sunny Spain. We reached the foot hills of the mountains on our fourth day of sleeping in hostels and roughing it with our newly bought tent, and by this time we had given up on hoping for sunshine or thinking that anything that we owned would ever get dry.

We started cycling up the mountain in yet more rain, it felt like we had the whole of Europes rain at our backs and in our faces constantly. But this was the day we would pass into proper Spain so we took the mountain with full force. We cycled for hours and hours, each bend in the road signalling a downward turn only for me to sprint to it and see that it dipped down only to straighten out even steeper than before. After a couple of hours of pretty much constant cycling we found a pub, they gave us a free plate of chips each and let us dry our clothes by the fire. This was the first of many, many examples of Spanish genorosity that we would encounter. We kept on cycling for a few more hours and just when  I was thinking we would have to camp for the night in the mountains the temperature dropped and the light drizzle that was coming down in sheets around us suddenly pulled up, like someone had pressed the pause button on life and we saw snow start to cover everything. At first we celebrated, it was the most beautiful snow that I had ever seen and looking out over the mountains with this snow falling was an unforgettable experience, but as we continued higher and higher we started to see it fall heavier and heavier. 4 inches came in about 15 minuites making it hard for us to cycle. We stopped for me to put socks over my hands and a bite to eat to keep our ever diminishing energy levels up. Felix had heard that there were wolves up in these mountains and at one time we had planned to search for them but with hypothermia around the corner we decided against it. We kept on cycling and cycling for what seemed forever untill finally we saw it level out. The joy in our hearts was enough to melt all the snow around us at that point. We uncovered a snow sheeted sign and found that it marked the top. 1260 meters of mountain and we had finally done it. We jumped up and down like maniacs.

We never even thought about the downhill ride. We didnt think it could possibly be worse coming down. The wind tore away at our joy of having reached the top, the snow bit into our already frost bitten hands and the snow being parted by our front tyres waterlogged our shoes and made our toes numb. But it wasnt too long till the first town. A twenty minuite ride took us to a little snow oasis of a town called Soto. Strongly recommended to stay in if anyone feels like snow boarding or skiing next winter. There was a god send of a little pub that reminded me of a swedish inn. They sold us really cheap and nice hot choclate and really cheap nice cider and the manager didnt seem to mind us dumping our wet clothes all over the place. The feeling that we had when we had finally dried off by the fire was an indescribable mixture of complete exhaustion and happiness of having finally made it into actual Spain. Even though it had been a hard first 4 days I think we both a lot happier for travelling.