When have you booked your flights? MrsPB and I have a loose plan to ride it this autumn, it's an area of Spain we haven't explored much apart from a visit to Sevilla 3 years ago. I bought the cycle guide book from an amazing shop in Barcelona, think Stanford's Spain, which divides the route into abo...

Given I'm a Motorola phone user, I'm thinking of pulling the trigger on their Defy gizmo, about €130 to buy with free 1st year then €5 a month for 30 messages which will do me, I don’t speak to MrsPB that many times a month in real life! They also sell a phone with the tech baked in but it's quite e...

Had to chuckle at the Lifetime warranty line on the Ti frame, is that the lifetime of the frame or the company which will be considerably shorter, about a year IMO.

Very cheery Saturday, in Bilbao cheering on the Yates twins to 1,2 in the TdF. Moving along to San Sebastian for tomorrow and Monday then the Tourmalet

Van Nicholas have a lifetime warranty on their Ti bikes and frames, good job really as I'm on my 4th frame in 10 years! 2x Redwood which were both soley used for bike packing trips about 6 times a year, same with a Zion Rohloff specific frame. Currently my beta testing victim is a Rowtag gravel bike...

Been sold to a sporting goods retailer backed by private equity, where have we heard that before? Based on current cycle industry return on capital employed, I'll give it another year at most. It'll take them that long to work out what a bag of sh\te their current stock inventory is and that no-one ...

Now is the Spring of our discount tents. IGMC

Fenton? FENTON!!!! Oh Jesus Christ!!

Quite good timing for this topic to come up. Yesterday morning at 6am I started a 450km gravel race from Barcelona to Valencia, given the tough terrain and 4,000m of climbing, I'd set myself a target of an overall average speed of 20kph, so 22+ hours of riding. Darkness falls quite quickly at 9.15 a...

How many months are you planning to be away for?

Do you think he'd make me a keyring if I asked nicely?

To cap it all, the original event is called Gravel Augusta, the nicked copycat is called Via Augusta Gravel.

Seems to be happening a lot. There's an event that covers the 450km from Barcelona to Valencia that a couple of friends have developed loosely following a Roman road called the Via Augusta. A couple of weeks ago one of them was asked on social media for the gpx for this year's event which he innocen...

By way of contrast, Spring has sprung here in Cataluña and with it a phenomenon whereby the thousands of hectares of fruit fields that the lower valley of the Ebro and Segre rivers are known for explode with colour due to the brief flowering of blossom. It's a bit like the autumn colours of trees in...

Sur-Ron electric motor and a long extension lead, it's the future

Was going to do a version of the Altravesur starting from Malaga but not sure I can be arsed with the faff of the train journeys needed. Guessing you didn't fancy doing the Spanish Divide from the 7th to 16th of April, I invited you in December but no response. There's 8 of us this year. Logistics ...

There's a campsite about 2km W of Trevelez that has small A frame cabins that are cozy and pretty cheap, the village is at 1,500m so you may be glad of the warmth, it's got a decent restaurant as well. Hope you've got your climbing legs on.

Misread the model name as Lofoten which made me think that it was designed for Arctic adventures. Gave me visions of Dave doing a bit of light ice breaking in Torbay.

Valeta this morning

Which route are you doing? You may find the peaks such as Valeta and Mulhacen snow bound, the deserts of Gorafe and Tabernas are within reach and pretty spectacular. The first edition of the Badlands was a good circular route before they started abandoning riders on the wrong side of the Siera Nevad...

Pico Valeta 3,396m in 2020


Pico Urbion 2,260m in 2021 plus in a white-out in 2022


Javalambre 2,016m in 2019 with some 'Boners

2 crows were arrested the other day and charged with attempted murder.















IGMC

New balls please.
1st km of the Spanish Divide and last flat for 1200km

I'm a baggy shorts, flat shoes and jacket kind of man

Sorry, had to be done.