Augie and I slept like babies last night and woke up fully charged for our first day biking. We loaded our bikes with our bags and hit the road. We had some troubles with finding the particular gas for the stove we had so we found another cheep alternative stove. Our maps took us off the road to a dirt path that wound through open fields with wild flowers, horses, and mountains in the distance. This area was beautiful and clean of trash. I am positive that I will have severe saddle soreness in the future due to all the juggling and bumping of that path. Eventually we were spit out onto a small backroad that took us winding up and down hills. Our destination for the night was in a national park so the ride slowly turned from vast open fields to being surrounded by huge trees. The landscape in the trees looked like something out of the Twilight series (big dark pine trees). That road was also cyclers galore. We were constantly seeeing cyclers fly by, a few even spoke with us asking about where we were going with all our bags. That was a great opportunity to work on our social Spanish. When we were climbing a decent hill, Augie’s wheel slipped off the lip the road and took a tumble. Augie is fine but the big derailleur of his bike got bent. Problem! We called out lovely mentors and Ryan said he could drive to us. Luckily for everyone, that beautiful windy road we were biking on earlier is not the most effocient road at all and the drive was only around 20 minutes. Augie and his bike were driven back to Segovia while I bicycled back. Because of the more efficient road, what took over two hours to get to from Segovia only took an hour to get back. I am happy that Google Maps took us on that beautiful ride but I think this project will be more successful if we take the most efficient routes. Augie found a new site called “mapmyride” that seems to have a far more direct trip for cyclers. We are getting Augie’s bike fixed first thing in the morning and planning on taking the more direct journey all the was to Madrid. What an exciting day!


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