Better late than never but I thought I would just give a quick summary of a trip we, me and Mrs Visor, took in Oct as per the title. I’m not a man of many words so it will mostly be a photo dump but please bear with me. It started off a few weeks earlier when Mrs Visor said that we were both off work at the same time so why don’t we take a trip to Jerez, she had found a route in Ride magazine which took 4 days each way. We checked ferries and Jerez and there were tickets available for both so it was on. The plan was to get the ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao, because the dates worked better than Santander, then 4 days riding through Spain and Portugal staying off motorways, 3 days in Jerez and 4 days back the same way. Cheap hotels and rooms for the journey and a cheap apartment with secure underground parking found in Jerez old town were all sourced and booked and the plan was complete. The trip to Portsmouth was uneventful other than some VERY muddy roads through Herefordshire and we were loaded on to the ferry for a 36 hour crossing. We unloaded at about 0800 from Bilbao after the calmest crossing I have ever seen and I’ve been on hundreds of boat trips, it was literally flat calm all the way. I had bought an Ultimateaddons case and used an old phone as the satnav by hot spotting my phone to it and using Calimoto to navigate after downloading the GPX files. These were the daily routes.
As you can see it consisted mostly of mountain routes and worked really well. There were a few teething problems with Calimoto but once I’d got my head round it, it worked really well. My big takeaway is that default setting is “twisty route” the problem with this is it really can take you down some meandering lanes and will sometimes take you off a nice road to go through a small village with cobbled roads to then put you back on the nice road just because it’s slightly twistier. Better to opt for the “non motorway” setting which still gives great roads but is a somewhat quicker option giving more time to explore each destination. Anyway, day one we had almost reached our destination when the heavens opened with an hour to go and we got drenched (thought it was a quick shower so didn’t stop to waterproof up, then was too wet to bother). The hostel didn’t have drying facilities so day 2 was spend in damp clothes but from then on the weather was glorious. On day 2 we ventured into Portugal which was a bit surreal as there was no border control so officially we were never there Now for the photo dump.
Apologies but these are just photos from the entire trip as I can’t remember what was when. Our return trip was the reciprocal. We arrived in Jerez on Friday so missed day one of practice but got Saturday and Sunday, our view from the grandstand wasn’t bad we were surprised at how few stands there were, particularly food stands but apart from that a great race weekend was had. As I said the return trip was just the reciprocal but great to see from the other direction. The ferry on the way back was anything but calm as we went through the Bay of Biscay, and the cafe lost most of their stock as they weren’t expecting it but other than that was ok. We had a cabin each way which I would highly recommend and an uneventful trip home. All told we did 2300 miles on some great twisty roads, had a fantastic 2 weeks and needed 3 new tyres on our return (Mrs Visor had just changed her rear tyre before we left as it would never have done the trip)
