Muddling through

March 4, 2022

Day 14 - Carrión de los Condes to Castrojeriz

Today started out well: we walked to the supermarket for supplies before setting off, and the day looked perfect, no sign of the intense storm of yesterday. The sky was a beautiful strong blue set against the often yellow and orange architecture of the town.

The first 10km or so went smoothly enough. After all the rain of the previous day we were worried about joining the camino, but when our route took us into it it looked fine: the same sensibly constructed hard gravel we had come to appreciate, well drained, and even where there was standing water it was usually avoidable, and still great for cycling.

Then, it struck.

The stickiest, most cloying, snowballing, unpleasant, stiff, clay-mud you can imagine. It got worse than in the pictures, picking up leaves and twigs and sticks and rendering our bikes unrideable. UnPUSHable!

There was only about 500m of this devil road but it probably delayed us by an hour! Pushing, scraping, cleaning, dragging, then once we were free, trying to get rid of enough of it to continue on. Probably doing weeks worth of drivetrain wear to our bikes in the few kilometres to follow.

After that, it wasn't so bad. We followed significant lengths of good gravel camino, we crossed a canal and rode along it, which was very picturesque.

But there were further challenges. We faced a pretty fierce headwind most of the day, as well as some hills and some rockier sections which were difficult, even with our wide tyres. The landscape was incredible though!

Rain bursting over a town in the distance.

If time team taught me anything, that's bound to be an iron age hill fort.

Then the final challenge of the day loomed. An enormous, ridiculously steep hill. Made all the worse for being unexpected.

The views from the top were almost worth the pain though.

And the descent was brief but kind of fun, though also too steep to enjoy most of!

Overall the day was hard, unexpectedly hard. I think the headwind really took it out of us without us realising, making the rest more of a struggle. The whole trip to date has been more difficult than I thought it would be! Consequently we have been going slower. I was imagining warmer, gentler, flatter, nice civilised Europe... Next up, the Pyrenees! 😂

Today's ride: 45 km (28 miles)
Total: 415 km (258 miles)

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