clairedavieswriter

“Can you tell me where I can buy lamp/bs?” said the man.We’d just finished checking in, and were getting the panniers off Bernard and Colin, when another guest walked into the foyer, and posed this question, in somewhat accented English, to the receptionist.“Lamps?” she asked. To be fair, that’s what I thought he’d said too.“No,…

Look! Blue sky! To be fair, we were probably also smiling because it was lunchtime and we’d already finished our cycling for the day.I’d originally planned to ride from Bilbao to Burgos in two days, but added an extra night in case the weather was bad and the distance too much straight out of the…

You’d be hard pressed to find either of these Castilian villages in a travel guide. They lack many of the features that tourists generally seek, but the welcome was warm, the locals accommodating (see The Kindness of Strangers, below) and frankly we were just grateful to find somewhere to stay in roughly the right place.…

A shout out first to the greengrocer in Bilbao who opened her till early to let me buy bananas. She’d initially said no. Not unreasonably, given that I’d blundered into her shop before opening time, dripping all over the floor she’d just mopped. But she must’ve taken pity on me given my bedraggled state and…

Bilbao greeted us with some properly Basque weather, but it couldn’t dampen our enthusiasm. Fortunately, Bernard and Colin weren’t feeling too queasy after two nights below decks. The weather in Bilbao wasn’t conducive to photography and soon we were heading into the countryside. As we discovered last year, it’s no coincidence that the north of…

Spring has sprung and the panniers are out. It must be time for Team Bernard’s next end-to-end cycle adventure. This time, Claire, Bernard the bike, Guillaume the Garmin (his predecessor’s younger and slightly less grumpy cousin), Hugo Headphones and Gloria Google will be joined by Jonis and his trusty bike Colin. Together, over the next…