10/11/2023 Bikepacking Spain Day 64 : Gah

It’s not often you see a sign in pure English, so I was happy to see that we had come from the “pure mountains.” —

Last night when we were camped in the “7 star Refugio” which had 3 different bedrooms, a light shone in the window. It was a bike packer! This is the first time we have had to share a Refugio in Spain, and luckily, I think this was the first one with multiple bedrooms too. His name was Callan, and he rode until late at night to get here. He had done 3 of his planned days in 2, but was exhausted from that. It was nice to have a fellow cyclist in the Refugio. If you came to one of these places solo, it might be a little creepy because they are so isolated and made of 2 foot thick concrete or stone.. so being 3 people felt that much more comfortable. He was on a Santa Cruz Blur. That is a cross country bike like ours, but XC bikes have morphed a lot into slack “downcountry” machines, so I didn’t even recognize his bike even though Janet and I have had 4 Blurs between the two of us! —

Riding was easy today on gravel roads. We did less towing and instead, I listened to podcasts and went about my usual pace. Today’s podcast was Peter Atilla interviewing a guy named Drew about performance enhancing drugs (for body builders, not cyclists). It was 3.5 hours long and they have to do a part 2 because there is so much more to talk about. I didn’t understand all of the hormone interactions, except that it’s extremely complicated and sounds hard to get right. The surprise for me was just how many bodybuilders die young… in their 20s, 30s, and 40s… and the massive doses they take! —

Video from yesterday which is pretty crummy; I’m more just archiving this for myself than providing anything interesting for you. Sorry!

A little drone flight to see what it was like near our camp last night. The Sierra Nevada is nice, but as you can see, not quite as dramatic as the Pyrenees and Picos de Europa. My scenery sensors have been saturated for a bit. I don’t know how long the half life of scenery sensor saturation is to get recharged for the next scenic section. 🤔 —

Janet and I ended up taking to a quite old woman with her cat outside her home. She kept saying, “que?” to everything I said. I tried to enunciate better, but then realized that she said “Que?” no matter what… it was like a delay tactic so she had time to process the information. Meaning, you didn’t necessarily need to repeat yourself. But then it got a little weird when her niece came over (the niece referred to the woman as her mom, not her aunt). The niece started taking to us in pretty good English, but it was some weird story where we understood the words but nothing made any sense. The older woman interrupted, saying in Spanish, “They don’t understand you they don’t speak English.” So we got a decent laugh out of that one… and maybe it explains why in cities we can have fluent conversations with people while in small villages, there are certain people who we aren’t going to understand - in any language!! 😕

That story about the niece and her Aunt is funny. Miscommunication no matter the language.

Paula G.