OMG Scott, that’s the photo of the tour! Fantastic, worth the effort to seek it out. Well done 👍

Wow, just fantastic! I can imagine your excitement.

A little thin alright, now that you mention it. Fortunately there was little traffic on this stretch and the driver were invariably considerate. No problemo!

That's not much of a shoulder, is it?

Funny how some of our best photos are accidental...

And so many "shoulda" shots are missed by being in the moment. But that's ok too. The moment will never return.

Funny. I had the same question when I looked at this photo. I didn’t see it at the time. Probably an imperial eagle.

So wonderful that you met up with Judy and Ken. Such a small world. They were the folks who linked us to your 2019 journal that took you through Puglia and subsequently inspired our CPH to Lecce tour later that year (and introduced us to CycleBlaze!)

What bird is that?

Yeah, you would've!

Cool landscape.

Wow. That's eerily impressive.

Funny about those glasses! I've had 3 pairs of reading glasses since I had my laser surgery about 15 years ago. As soon as I no longer needed coke bottle glasses, I opted for rimless-bottom specs. None of them have ever had a lens come out and they all got worn a lot as I needed them for work. The current ones are overdue for replacement but the lenses are still firmly in place.

I saw that, because in one of the versions of this tour we were going to visit the delta. It’s apparently the principal rice cultivation area of Spain. It’s nothing like that up here though, maybe 200 miles into the interior. These are just a few isolated flooded fields that suggest rice but might be something else.

We will be riding through the Ebro delta, I believe, and it is apparently a rice growing region.

Correct! Possibly a Convolvulus hawkmoth.

https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/124031-Agrius-convolvuli/browse_photos?place_id=6774