Never Have I Worked So Hard for So Few (Miles)

When I first started planning the routes for this vacation, I thought that there might be some short days -- where I rode maybe 40 miles -- and one or two long days with at least 100 kilometers. That was even when I mapped out the routes on Ride With GPS and realized that those 100K days could have over 10,000 feet of climbing.

"Meh," I said. "I've done 200Ks with over 15,000 feet. How hard could these be?"

Turns out -- pretty hard.

RandoGirl and I did a little 14-mile out-and-back on the first day, riding up to Els Cortals d'Encamp. This is a ski resort just outside of town, which during the season you can get to via a lift. We went up the hard way.

All of the Andorran routes had signs like this:

These were so you know that you were riding a famous cycling route, and also so you knew what the average gradient would be for the next kilometer. This one says the average is 9.4%, which doesn't sound too bad until you remember that it's an "average," which means that there are some parts that are "just" 9% and other parts 9.8%. And a kilometer at 9.8% is about as hard as a kilometer at 10%, and that gets hard ... particularly when the next kilometer averages 9.6%.

Which is a long way of saying that it took us about a two hours to get to Els Cortalis, particularly since I took a lot of pictures on the way up.

Here's RandoGirl, with Encamp in the background.

This remarkable house was built onto a promontory -- great use of nature, plus they had a gorgeous view.

RandoGirl near the top, smiling like always.

And we made it! Just as the light rain set in.

The descent down was fast. RandoGirl had brought her bicycle with disk brakes, and I found myself envying her that, particularly when we got to the steeper stuff near the bottom with the harsh switchbacks.

Back at the hotel, we got cleaned up, bought provisions, and went to lunch. I then took the car and scouted a route going over the Collada de Beixalis and coming back on the Coll d'Ordino. When I got back, a bunch of our friends had shown up, and we began to partake of the provisions.

From there, we all stumbled out to dinner at Border del Tremat on a lovely cool evening. The next day everyone wanted to do the same route as RandoGirl and I had done, with some folks coming down a different way. It took a lot of strategerizing, so Connie Weisner and I went up first to scope things out.

To go back we turned at Llac d'Engolasters and went through the park there to the other side. Then we took a different road down to Engordany, coming back up the main road to Encamp.

At the hotel everybody was ready to ride. Some drove one of the cars up to the parking lot at Llac d'Engolasters to avoid the steepest parts of the route, while the rest of us rode our bikes up.

Yeah, that's a tandem. Steve and Joyce Grizzle were hard core, biking the painful first kilometers of the climb. This was one of only two tandems that I saw during our stay in Andorra.

Zita Smith was a climbing machine all week, pretty much taking QOM points every time.

And here's the other tandem, with Mike and Patty Wilman, at the penultimate turn before the top.

Connie rode up with Karla McVey and Jill Flowers.

After we all got to the top, the motorcyclists who had been sunning themselves in their underwear had to pull up their pants.

Zita had been enjoying the demonstration of the European dress codes.

After a brief celebration, we descended to Llac d'Engolasters again. RandoGirl and Steve and Joyce had already seen the sights, so they headed straight down to Encamp the way that we had come up, along with Connie and Karla. The rest of us took the fun descent to Engordany, then came up the way that Connie and I had earlier.

After getting cleaned up, everyone took a break. Meanwhile, I ran down to Andorra la Vella to try to find a laundromat. Google said that there was one, but I never could find it. While there, however, I went back to the bike store there and bought the next larger jersey. Now I had a memento of the trip ... although it turns out that I got a more interesting one later.

When I gave up on finding a coin laundromat, I went back to the hotel and asked Anna. She said that there was a place that would do laundry down the road, so I took the clothes there. They had them ready the next day, and only charged me 11 Euros.

That night we went to dinner at Borda Vella in Encamp. I would show you pictures, but we were very busy eating and drinking and had more digestifs.

The next day would be our longest ride yet ... but that's for the next blog.

Andorra? Isn't That Where They Make the Sweaters?

I first heard about Andorra from my friends Steve and Joyce Grizzle. We were talking about retirement and how it would be fun to live in Europe, and they told us that it was fairly easy to get residency in Andorra and that it was relatively inexpensive. Then, this past November ... I think it was very late on a Tuesday evening ... RandoGirl and I came to the realization that maybe we needed to look into residency in another country after we retire. Such phrases as "exit strategy" and "country going to shit" featured in this discussion.

So we explored further and discovered that it actually is possible to get residency in Andorra -- maybe not easy, but possible. We also found that there are many professional cyclists living there now, and that it is eclipsing Girona, Spain (made popular by a famous Texan who, in retrospect, never won any bike races) as THE place to live and train. When I dug further and found a hotel in the city of Encamp whose website touted their bicycling amenities, and then discovered you could book a room there for a week quite cheaply, we had our summer cycling vacation.

As we had done with the Tuscany tour two years earlier, we contacted a bunch of cycling friends to see who else might want to come along. Surprisingly, many of the folks from that trip still wanted to hang out with me (nah, it was probably RandoGirl), and we soon had 10 folks converging from middle Tennessee for the first few days of July.

Unlike the Tuscany trip, we kept the details of this vacation pretty loose, with everybody making their own arrangements. Whereas we had engaged BikesPlus! for Tuscany, in Andorra we would all just be staying at the same hotel and riding (more or less) a set of routes that I put together based on website research. Five of us brought our own bikes, two couples rented tandems, and one solo rider rented her bike.

RandoGirl and I left the states on June 29, flying to Toronto for a long layover, and then on from there to Barcelona. We were pretty bleary when we got off the plane at what was Friday morning for them, but managed to retrieve our luggage and bike boxes, load them into the rental car, find our way out of the city, and eventually get to Andorra.

Crossing the Andorran border was kind of surreal. RandoGirl rolled down the window as we pulled up to the guard. He looked at us blankly. She said, "Are we free to just go in?" He kind of shrugged and smiled a bit, saying, "Sure."

So we drove on.

Since RandoGirl did not have cartridges for the tire inflator in her bike bag, we stopped briefly in a bike shop in the capital, Andorra la Vella. I ran in to try to get cartridges, but the clerk spoke only Catalan and I was unable to communicate what I needed (it later turned out that the store had cartridges -- I should have just looked further). They had a nice jersey, so I went ahead and got my souvenir trip momento ... although it turned out that Andorrans must be really tiny, because the XL did not fit me but was perfect on RandoGirl.

From there, we went to our home for the week -- the Hotel Univers in Encamp. The owners -- Anna and Juame -- got us into a lovely room with a balcony looking over the river. We unpacked and took a nap, and then unloaded the bikes and assembled them. After another nap, we went down the street to a restaurant that RandoGirl had found online -- Borda Vella -- where we had a great dinner. As we walked back to the hotel about 10 pm local time, we felt full and happy, synced up with our new time zone, and ready to ride the next day.