Time slogs or sprints.. which?
Travelling tweaks time senses,
Gives fresh perspective.
We're now halfway through the time of our trip: hurray! It's going to be just over 6 months, from 15 May to 23 November, and this is haalfwaaaaaaaaay!!!
Anyway, today's biking... let's see... we woke up on the playground and had our breakfasts (we usually stop three times for breakfast: first breakfast is müsli, second breakfast is pastry, and third breakfast is bocadillos, yoghurt, and juice) which we had actually planned ahead for, then headed out. It was a fairly easy ride, I suppose, punctuated by drizzle and a few large-ish hills. It's wonderful to ride through these areas; all the time we spent in the desert makes Cataluña positively lush by comparison. It's also a lot more humid, which makes riding a little less pleasant, but the scenery continues to be worth it.
We spent a fair amount of today along the coast. Well, "along the coast" in the sense that the roads we took were very close to the water, but we generally couldn't see much due to condos and hotels and the like that had sprung up on all beachfront property. Fortunately, there were boardwalks behind them some of the time, which we happily rode along. We spent some time discussing the fact that it's going to be impossible for us to drive a car when we get back across the pond. A good part of our navigation now hinges on the facts that we can a) take small dirt paths, b) go the wrong way up streets occasionally, and c) ride on sidewalks when necessary. Those things are generally frowned upon when one conducts an automobile.
As we neared our goal, a town called Santo Carlos de la Rápita, the scenery changed for the sadder. Due to a lot of expansion of the blessed autoroutes in this area, in conjunction with the building of several large industrial plants, there are a lot of abandoned buildings around. We stopped in a hotel along the side and poked around. Some areas of it were collapsing, but in general it was in reasonable condition and just covered in graffiti. Art.
We took our break in Santo Carlos, and we intended to hang out in a park or something until evening fell and we could go somewhere interesting and perhaps meet people (and perhaps convince them to host us ;)), but we were chased into a café rather early by a giant thunderstorm that lasted several hours. Not the end of the world, but we didn't manage to find any hosts...
Anyway, we headed out when it was dark and camped in the natural park of the Ebro river delta. It's nice out here, but mostly flat and mostly farmland (as one might imagine a river delta to be). Tomorrow we head further towards Barcelona!