Gwilym's Adventure Blog

  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...

Since 1979 The Village People having been telling us to " Go West ". Well I did that today and I ran out of road. A great start to the day that was overcast and never went above 20 degrees allowed me to ride for a full 4 hours stopping just once for fuel before my first major goal of this trip. Cabo da Roca is the most westerly point on mainland Europe. What was really nice was that coffee and cake was only a third of the price of the same at Nordkapp. After my snack there, I used the toll motorway to bypass Lisbon but that didn't go well. When I approached the toll both I saw what I thought was a bike lane and rolled through thinking it was nice they didn't charge bikes.  Well, 50km later I found out it wasn't a bike lane and had to explain to a man in a booth why I had no ticket. 30 euro fine for me. but I did shave off about 50km and 2 hours form the route above Anyway, back on the nice roads and I was heading south. A quick glance at ...

With my sat nav just set in the general direction of Lisbon and motorways turned off I set off from the campsite this morning open minded about where I was going. The start to the day was great, a bit of cloud cover kept the temps under 20 and then up and over some Spanish and then Portuguese mountain passes when I was actually in the cloud, which kept me cool until about 10:30 (or so I thought). I realised pretty quickly that once I had entered Portugal the clocks went back an hour so it was 09:30 and therefore very hot or that time of the morning. The sign in second photo down (you may have to zoom in) was a little confusing but I just kept going. Anyway, the day went on, the bends through the vineyards went on for smiles and smiles (yes I know it is kilometres but the joke won't work then) For the best part of two hours nothing was straight and I actually wanted a short bit of no bends to get into 4th gear and to relax but no, the hairpins kept coming. T...