As you will gather from the title, today saw us battling up some steep climbs. We had one very long one that averaged around 6%, some much steeper. One was impossible for us and we had to push for a bit.

Very impressed with the car and lorries giving a large passing gap on their overtaking. Most got into opposite lane, this was very comforting indeed.

My Garmin radar works very well giving me lots of warning of an approaching vehicle. No false alerts, so very reliable indeed. Motor bikes were a bit of a pain to be honest, roaring passed at about twice the speed limit and passing unnecessarily close.

A bit on food (for Gayle)…….

Below is the smallest muffin I have ever seen.

For lunch we have stopped off at bars and consumed a few of the pre-prepared nibbles on offer. Here is what we had today, with two cokes this was only 11 Euros, tip top.

Just after the scoff above we came across an artist, ‘ohh that looks interesting’ we thought and pulled alongside to engage with Pablo. Just upon starting the convo, a bloke in a beat up 4×4 wanted us to move to get passed, so we moved forward, but he just nudged forward – blank face, obviously communicating with us through mind transfer, similar to Boris I think, come to think of it he looked like one. Eventually we twigged he wanted to park in front of Pablo. I wish I could have snapped the moment when Pab’s realised this bloke was parking directly in front of his scene. Arms thrown up, lots of rapid fire Spanish, Pabs was not very happy, we had never seen him like that before. Anyway the bloke moved forward to within a inch of the car behind. Here is Pabs post this event.

Some general pics of today’s surroundings – smooth roads up the valley, surrounded by trees; a remote church atop an interesting hill; the ‘tabletop’ hill we had in our sights for several hours as we climbed up the valley; lots of poppies dotted the fields as we moved from gorges and hills and into agricultural lands; we rode through 4 tunnels today – this one was 580m long, the others were each less than 100m; looking down the valley we have climbed up from Guenes, our rest stop last night.

Fairly early on we took three attempts to get to our route, in this instance Garmin was correct but wanted to route us along some very rough stone track – top RH pic – so I doubled-back on to a steep sealed road that offered no suitable way through – bottom RH – so we were left with a grassy track which got us on track – LH.

The summit was finally reached following a fair bit of graft. We did about 1150m elevation gain today that shows we had a bit of up and down along the way. A total of 78km today.

Here is the elevation profile:

Along the route we came across this little grotto on the side of the road:

It didn’t look much really and I guess most motorised vehicles would just whizz by, but by this time we were looking for regular rests to breathe a bit of life back into weary legs. So we stopped off. Walking through the ‘cave home’ we found a small hamlet of grottos. Amazing ‘find’, as I scribe I realise our photos are a bit thin on this one. But there was a cut in the hill, small stream running with cave homes on each side, about 8 or so. Here’s a shot of a local boy.

Arriving at Ona, a lovely village with narrow cobbled streets and very tidy.

Nice view from lodgings, this time the view is real! (a hint for those trying to solve the riddle in yesterday’s post – ie Jemma) – a monastery.