Another place on our list.

Must go!

Have to go too!

Yes!

Have to go!

Yes!

Hi Stewart,
You are welcome, thank you for following along. We write this mainly to keep the days straight in our heads as on longer trips they had a tendency to meld together so it is a great reminder.
Saying that we really appreciate that people follow along and enjoy the ride with us. Thanks for taking a moment to let us know.

Hi Scott,
We will definitely be back in the Pyrenees again (maybe the French side?) and thank you and Rachael for exposing us to it. It was reading your Bilbao to Sete journal that put it on our radar. Each day of riding cycles from sublime through to spectacular, and for us the food in Spain was incredible. The best of both worlds

Hi Scott,
Pure dumb luck on my part that I have all the detailed data from our past rides. When I bought our original Garmin, a simple Edge 500 that we still use, I vaguely recalled having to sign up for a Garmin Connect account. I never used this or accessed it until after our 2017 EV6ish trip when I had a look at it and discovered that every ride that I had ever recorded, and synched to my computer, was stored in Garmin Connect. This goes back to 2012 and our Chartres / Normandy Beach loop tour (which I might get around to publishing here). If you have a Garmin Connect account, you might be in luck in having some historical data kicking around, and it’s very simple to download it from Connect in an MS Excel compatible .csv file.
Anyway, it great for a data junky like me and I can make up and play around with correlations like ‘climb intensity’ to convince myself that’s why we are going slower. After that I then go and look at my Dorian Gray picture in the attic … or is that a mirror?

I have thoroughly enjoyed following you on this journey, a well written and interesting account. Thank you.

I loved reading this and recognizing and remembering our own experience on nearly all of your respective top five rides. I’d love to ride the Col de Nargo again - really, I’d be pretty happy to ride the entire Spanish side of the Pyrenees again if I thought I could. It’s one amazing day after another.

I can’t say I feel the same about the restaurants though. Maybe if I could taste or smell I’d feel differently.

That last graph is inspired and makes me wish I’d kept track of our average speeds, which I’ve never done. I do have good numbers on distance and elevation per day though, which is definitely going down at a similar rate I’m sure. I’d probably toss out this year as an aberration for health reasons, but even before that we’ve definitely been opting for shorter, easier days and more day rides without the panniers.

You will get to meet him! ( btw this is K writing)

That is so true Rachael, in past tours we often didn't stop enough to 'smell the roses' or in this case it would have been the poppies!

He is so cute!