Leaving the Ebro delta and its straight-line paths etched into swampy river deposit soil in early dawn to beat the morning rush. We rise to the sun, rays gleaming off dew-streaked tent fabric, the anti-camouflage orange beaming in its barely-hidden roadside refuge. 12 km into the next town, where we find ourselves dancing around the autopísta bridge over the river to find another less car-centric crossing further down - good opportunity for a morning stretch and petrol station bakery pastry. Petrol stations and bakeries: and never the twain shall meet...but this is Europe, where nothing is so sacred that it cannot support an overpriced café. Valkyrie quips that she should make it her mission to take coffee at every UNESCO World Heritage Site, and I agree. Why not? Coffee is the fruit of colonialism's worst excesses, that quaint precursor of our modern predilection for stripping the earth bare, packing it up in neat containers, and shipping the whole mess halfway around the globe to be reconstituted into food additives or something equally banal.
Digressions are easy out here - mental, navigational, whatever. The terrain invites it, perhaps; in this part at least, it is flat...except that is wishful thinking, for no sooner have we put some meagre distance between ourselves and the delta croplands than the N-340 (which, as we learn later, is simply an Automobile Age take on the Via Augusta that connected these lands millenia ago, and which Emperor Augustus himself ordered renovated from 8 to 2 BC) climbs around an impassable stretch of coastal mountains. We ride on. Hills and mountains mean very little by now. The work is not even really hard; it is long, protracted, incremental, all of these things - but not difficult, not strenuous. The topographical peculiarities bring magnificent views at the cost of distance and effort, a worthy tradeoff...
...and we reach Tarragona for midday, riding through its exurbs past Universal Mediterranea and a multi-stenched bank of chemical plants (one of which, we wryly note, specializes in animal food products) to reach a lackluster downtown where we pause for local beers in the restaurant-café of this hotel, this being the first place we locate with wifi. After that, we head out along the coast towards a pair of ancient Roman landmarks. The first is a Roman funereal pylon, the second a triumphal arch at Bará, both ostensibly placed here to ensure that travellers and merchants properly remembered the glory of Rome on their way...
...the road drops away from the N-340 along the coast. We are glad to leave the busy highway behind, since we vastly prefer the boardwalks and beachside trails out this way. We have entered a veritable tourist mecca here, a zone far enough from hectic Barcelona to provide the illusion of peaceful privacy yet close enough that one is never without the necessities of life; for what is life without surfboard shops, late-night supermarkets, and cafés that line the beaches piercing star-speckled darkness with garish neon signs? This is not the place for stealth camping; it is far too upscale and pristine, a place with that familiar touristic varnish...and yet, against all odds, we happen upon this abandoned building in a park surrounded by apartments, an anachronism somehow spared the increasingly rapid march of progress - and we eat a sumptuous camping-stove meal of tortilla patata, melón y jamón, and bocadillo con queso y champiñon, our hacked-together take on tapas in cyclist-portion format. A quick hop down to the beach where we exchange the car exhaust that by now coats every last surface of our lungs for the relatively clean sea breeze, then off to bed on the terrace of an old house that is ours for a night, graffiti and all...