Day 15: Aroche to Higuera (60km, 1000m, road rode)

Sep 28

We’ve decided to wrap up the bikepacking part of our trip and pivot to part 2: get our bikes to Barcelona, and, find some good food/beach/hang time. This is a combo of Ryley and I finding the EDT pretty hard and a bit too much work on our parts to convince Axel to be biking. It was always intended to be (mostly) type 1 fun for everyone. On our day off, Axel demanded to go bike riding (on a smooth road)…and that’s part of the plan.

Today’s experiment was to test ride the (smooth) state highway to see how busy/hot/safe we found it. The state highway intersects our original route in Aracena, so we can kick back into gravel if it’s a no go. Then, we decide based on how it went whether we gravel bike 5 more days to Cordoba, or, state highway 1 more day to Seville. It went great, actually – not too hot, the roads were fairly busy but didn’t feel unsafe, and it was very satisfying to make good progress despite 800m of climbing to Aracena.

We decided we’ll continue on to Seville and see what vacationing looks like on our vacation – hey, maybe we’ll even like it.

Despite going through several towns on the main road, we still found very little open during the day so made our own lunch at closed restaurant beside a gas station. We found the town square in Aracena so Axel could play on the playground and actually a bunch of the restaurants were quite busy, so we checked a few out but they were so busy we couldn’t get seating. Then, when we did, we got a drink but when we tried to order food we were told the kitchen was closed until dinner (this was around 4). Just adding to our pile of evidence that Spanish people survive on coffee, beer and cigarettes 路‍♀️

It was a bit harder to find camping tonight but we tucked into a side road and set up camp, made ramen, went on a couple big bear hunts, had another nice sunset, and Axel finally fell asleep just before 10pm…oh my.