September 25th - Ceuta (guest post by Mum)

We’ve left Europe! At least that’s nearly true - we’re in Ceuta which is still Spain, but the border with Mexico is a few km down the road. And this is my first blog post, which I agree with Phoebe is totally shameful. She says she’s feeling the pressure, and has even started calling it “my blog” so it’s time for me to reclaim it.

Cycling through France and Spain has been fabulous! France must be one of the best countries to cycle through. We did a lot of it on traffic free routes (I love voies vertes!) , which were mainly perfect tarmac, and although we managed to get lost multiple times it was nearly always our own fault. Beautiful countryside, perfect weather, amazing food, and we could speak enough French to communicate. It was a shock to cross over into Spain and immediately realise how helpless we were with our pathetic Spanish. But we’ve loved Spain too! Even though the cycling and navigating has been more challenging. We’ve ridden on roads that we wouldn’t dream of cycling on in the UK with pelotons of tail-gating lorries thundering past us at full speed, and even a motorway - illegally and totally my fault. At the other extreme roads that stopped being roads and turned into rough tracks, and sometimes faded altogether, and also cycle tracks that were really much too rough for our heavy loaded bikes. Our daily mileage has gone down, but the daily effort has remained high, with quite a lot of slow progress and also pushing our bikes. I do have an uneasy feeling that Spain can hardly be the worst country for these problems! On the other had we’ve cycled on some fabulous roads, particularly when we ventured inland and up through the mountains, with stunning views and very light traffic.

We started in Brittany with fields of corn, and then the great excitement of our first field of sunflowers- sadly over - in fact we only saw 2 fields which were in full bloom. Then as we travelled South we went through the wine regions, and for days saw only vineyards. In France we could buy beautiful fresh fruit and vegetables straight from the fields Through Spain the agriculture has been amazing - we’ve seen everything being grown that we buy in the UK - acres and acres of peppers, courgettes, tomatoes, melons etc etc. It’s incredible that it grows from soil that looks like dry orange rock. When we camped underneath our first olive tree that was exciting, but since then through Andalucia we’ve seen SO many - I was very disappointed to find out the olives aren’t ready until November, and I’m very worried about how they can possibly harvest that number of olives. We were surprised to find ourselves one day suddenly in a very lush bright green area, which turned out to be rice growing, and then further south a crop I hadn’t seen before - cotton! Phoebe gets much less excited than me about what is growing around us!

I’ve got so much more to say! But it’s now light and time to get on our bikes! The weather has been so, so hot that we’ve tried to cycle early, have a long break, and then cycle late. We had a couple of long lunches sitting underneath olive trees waiting for the thermometer on my cycle computer to get below 40 before we carry on! We have no map for Morocco, and failed to buy one yesterday, so we haven’t even planned where we’re going today. Heading South……