October 22, 2023
Valencia
Our last stage of the tour gets off to a peculiar and uncomfortable start when we go down to the dining room early to serve ourselves coffees while we wait for breakfast at eight. It seems like this should be fine, as there is a sign on the wall listing the prices for the various self-serve items available - coffee, tea, beer, chips, etc.
Rachael brews me a cafe con leche and returns to the machine to prepare her own when our host walks in. Her face immediately tenses up and darkens, and she starts scolding us in Spanish or maybe even Valencian,pantomiming emphatically that only she is to prepare coffee and that it won’t be ready until eight. Very confusing. What’s the point of that sign on the wall? We take the one cup that’s already brewed back up to our room for Rachael, who’s more desperate than me to get it into her system first thing than I am, and then wait another half-hour before going town again to a so-so breakfast. Odd.
An hour later we’re in the alley with the bikes. As we’re preparing to leave Rachael discovers that one of the prongs has snapped off her GoPro mount so we’ll be closing out the tour without a video to remember the final stage by. Sad, but of course we’re lucky this occurred at the very end rather than back before the earlier, much more dramatic stages.
Our host, the cafe con leche faux pas behind us and smiling now, points down the alley and gestures to indicate it’s flat all the way to Valencia. We head the other direction though, back to the port, because I’ve forgotten that I mapped us to and from a different hotel than this place. Originally we had booked ourselves into one at the port but later changed our minds, and I forgot to modify our routes accordingly. Confusing this morning, but it’s easier to just backtrack the three miles to the port and pick up the route we’ve mapped than to rethink one on the fly.
Once we reach the coast we turn south and follow the coastline, beginning with a few miles through an uninspiring warehouse district. We’re lucky we’re doing this on a Sunday morning when it’s so quiet, or we’d likely be sharing the road with cargo haulers.
Coming on the end of such a spectacular last month filled with one exceptional highlight after another, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the final stage of the tour, a completely flat run along the coast through a mix of warehouse districts, expanses of orange groves and artichokes, and finally the suburbs of sprawling Valencia comes as something of a letdown. Still, we’d better stop for a few photos along the way, especially since there’s no action footage.
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Right on schedule, we arrive at the first of the resorts just north of of Valencia just past one and grab a table for lunch. We enjoy a fine meal, but it may have been a questionable decision to have a second glass of vino tinto when we still have seven miles left in the ride. Fortunately they continue to be pancake flat except for a pair of overpasses and we enjoy a relaxed cruise along the sandy waterfront watching folks playing beach volleyball, a scene that reminds us of Nice.
A mile from our hotel we bike past one of the city’s landmarks, the City of Arts and Sciences. I’d forgotten all about this somehow, but it really is an exceptional complex. I stop for a few quick snaps, but we’ll be back for a deeper look before we leave.
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We’re booked at the Malcom and Barret Hotel, a place we’ve stayed before that in an odd way has sentimental value for me. This is the hotel we originally booked four years ago as the last stop on our ride from Santiago, after obtaining their agreement to accept and hold our suitcases. Maddeningly, when the time came they didn’t accept them after all due to a mixup of some kind, so they were returned to Santiago - inconvenient, since we were a week down the road in Portugal by that time and we ended up triple billed by UPS: once for the first shipment, once for the return, and once for shipment to a different hotel. We found a different hotel to have them shipped to, but I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for the place ever since because when the manager heard what happened she apologized and offered us two nights free lodging as compensation. Which we accepted - we changed our plans and arrived in Valencia two days early, staying here for two nights before moving on to the other hotel and our suitcases.
End of the road! We’ll be here for four nights taking day rides, hiking, seeing some sights, and so on. Don’t go away just yet.
Ride stats today: 30 miles, 400’; for the tour: 1,334 miles, 52,900’
Today's ride: 30 miles (48 km)
Total: 1,334 miles (2,147 km)
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