Gwilym's Adventure Blog

What a day! I left the hotel around 10am and completed a full lap of Gibraltar, it was already getting hot. I used the motorway to get round the Monstropolis (Monstrosity + Metropolis) that is Malaga and then selected "avoid motorways" and followed the smaller roads.  The route above is approx. but I was on the N340 hugging the coast rather than the A7 which this is showing. I have been up and over numerous mountain passes, had bend after bend after bend, hit 36 degrees at one point before returning to the coast for a sea breeze and a much cooler 27 degrees, before heading high again to my planed night here at Trevelez in the heart of the Sierra Nevada. The last 20km to get here was just the icing on the cake with awesome views and great biking roads. The art to motorcycle touring is staying hydrated and synchronising ones bladder with the fuel tank on the bike. Today I award myself 1/10 as following my run this morning I over hydrated and had to have a...

The day started with a quick run up to the top of The Rock of Gibraltar which is 426m high. I took the winding roads up but they were much steeper than they looked on the map. Great views from the top of the bay and across to Morocco I took the direct route down the Charles V Wall which is basically a set of very steep knee shattering steps and bumped into the local Barbary Macaques along the way. Having been advised to avoid trying to leave Gibralter between 8am and 9am as the queues at the border would be bad, I am now slowly packing the bike with a plan to b on the road by 10am which is by far the latest start time of this trip.

  What a rough night! Too hot to sleep properly and a dog barking constantly. In the early hours, I heard a noise in my porch during the night and there was a cat in there. It soon got sent on its way. After starting the bike up at 7:06am (just to make sure no one would complain about the 7am rule), today was a mile munching day where all roads are game on and so it was a mix of motorway ring roads to avoid large towns and fast trunk roads in between. Goodbye Portugal and back into Spain for another of the goals for this trip. That was to get to the most southerly point on mainland Europe which is the small island at Tarifa. Sadly you are not allowed to drive along the causeway so I had to walk the last 200 metres or so to the fort. I have now been to the North ,South and West points of Europe but East will take some planning as people can't agree where it is. There are a number of options but as people can't decide if Mont Blanc or Elbrus is the highest mo...