{"id":681,"date":"2003-04-27T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2003-04-27T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/globetrotters.co.uk\/newsletter\/2003\/04\/27\/cataluna-chill-out-by-tony-annis\/"},"modified":"2003-04-27T22:00:00","modified_gmt":"2003-04-27T22:00:00","slug":"cataluna-chill-out-by-tony-annis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globetrotters.co.uk\/newsletter\/cataluna-chill-out-by-tony-annis.html","title":{"rendered":"Cataluna Chill Out by Tony Annis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It was 31<sup>o <\/sup>C and a cold one slipped easily<br \/>\n down my throat.  The cyclists were lying in the hot sun, and yet this<br \/>\n was still England.  We were awaiting our pickup from the European Bike<br \/>\n Express, which was on the way down from Middlesbrough.  They do three<br \/>\n routes: Alpine, Mediterranean and Atlantic.  For some of the cyclists<br \/>\n this was their third trip, a good omen I thought.  The Alpine route bus<br \/>\n pulled in, on time to the second, picked up its passengers and their bikes,<br \/>\n and was off.  Soon we were on the Mediterranean bus, off and rolling.<br \/>\n The idea is that buses drop you off en route and pick you up at a mutually<br \/>\n agreed point somewhere on the return route.<\/p>\n<p>I was taking &#8216;time out&#8217; from urban London and its tourists,<br \/>\n to join all the rest of the tourists who had gone to the Costa Brava.<br \/>\n Through &#8216;The London Cyclist&#8217; I had found out about the Bus<br \/>\n and its enormous specially designed bike trailer.  This was a holiday<br \/>\n that had to be taken in a limited time.  I wanted to chill out, with some<br \/>\n good food, wine and a little exercise, in other words, fifteen days of<br \/>\n fun in the sun, or so I hoped. <\/p>\n<p>A couple called the Champions were taking their tandem.  They had King<br \/>\n of the Mountain racing jerseys &#8211; and of course they were dropped<br \/>\n off in the south of France to do some climbing.  Meanwhile I and one of<br \/>\n the other fellow cyclists, John McGuigan, spent the night at the town<br \/>\n at the end of the line.  Empuriabrava is a large holiday town, with large<br \/>\n campsites, and man made canals with hundreds if not thousands of moorings<br \/>\n each with their own house!  It was not exactly what I wanted from my holiday<br \/>\n but I knew that if I looked around I would find many uncrowded places.<br \/>\n The next day John cycled off.  I stayed another day as my birthday was<br \/>\n coming up and I wanted to celebrate.  And celebrate I certainly did.<br \/>\n I swam in the Med, went for a cycle ride, ate an excellent fish dinner,<br \/>\n drank lots of wine with some Germans, and then smoked a cigar.  The next<br \/>\n morning I woke up somewhere near my tent and decided it was time to move<br \/>\n on.  The idea was to spend two or three days at a different campsite and<br \/>\n explore the local area in a cycling softy sort of way.   <\/p>\n<p>A good campsite on the other side of town in a small National park, called<br \/>\n &#8216;Camping Laguna&#8217; became a favourite.  Laguna is still big<br \/>\n but it faces the sea, and the town can be reached by wading across the<br \/>\n Lagoon exit or a fourteen kilometre ride to the nearest bridge.  My next<br \/>\n stop going south was a small town called Sant Pere Pescador, a campsite<br \/>\n by the river, which of course was called, &#8216;Camping El Rio&#8217;.<br \/>\n This place is the start of a cycle track that leads all the way to L&#8217;Escala.<br \/>\n From here it was a delightful days gentle cycling starting on a slightly<br \/>\n roughish track from the river, continuing by the sea and ending up as<br \/>\n a paved track into L&#8217;Escala, a popular resort but at the same time<br \/>\n still a nice old town.    <\/p>\n<p>I had travelled down the coast on a boat and had seen some great looking<br \/>\n harbours, from Rosas to a lovely town called Cadaques, and had decided<br \/>\n that not withstanding a very hard climb, I would visit it.  At first the<br \/>\n fifteen Kilometre climb seemed not too bad, then perspiration broke out<br \/>\n all over my body &#8211; or was it the red wine leaking out of my system?  Then<br \/>\n I began to wonder: why was I carrying so much gear?  It&#8217;s at times like<br \/>\n this that I remember all the stories about the cyclists who cut their<br \/>\n toothbrush in half, have an extra small toothpaste tube and also don&#8217;t<br \/>\n carry a bottle of wine in their bottle cage!  The hill grew steeper, the<br \/>\n cars hooted to give me encouragement, the sweat streamed into my eyes.<br \/>\n I looked up and the lovely girl in front said, &#8220;If you can&#8217;t keep<br \/>\n up you don&#8217;t deserve me&#8221;.  Another two Kilometres and I new the<br \/>\n fantasy of the girl wasn&#8217;t enough to keep me going, so I changed<br \/>\n the fantasy to an Afghanistan warlord chasing me on horseback and I had<br \/>\n to get to the top before he cut my head off.  I collapsed finally at the<br \/>\n top of the hill with clouds all round me, so no vista after all that effort.<br \/>\n Then rolled all the way down to Cadaques, wimped out and booked into a<br \/>\n hotel for this one night.  The film the &#8216;The Bourne Identity&#8217;<br \/>\n had its last happy scenes in this town and it was certainly worth the<br \/>\n pain of the climb.  Should I come back this way again, I will certainly<br \/>\n revisit this picturesque town by the sea.  My one mistake was to buy a<br \/>\n disco ticket without looking or listening properly to the seller.  It<br \/>\n turned out to be for young people between the ages of twelve to sixteen.<br \/>\n Embarrassing, especially when the doorman asked me, &#8220;where is the<br \/>\n young person that you&#8217;ve brought with you&#8221;?  As he looked<br \/>\n at my one ticket and me!   <\/p>\n<p>Back on the Bus, John, the Champions and I exchanged stories and drank<br \/>\n some wine, maybe more than a little, as the bus rolled on into the night,<br \/>\n through France and on to England &#8211; and yes we did have fifteen days<br \/>\n of fun in the sun.  <\/p>\n<p><b><i>About Tony, the author of this article:<\/i><\/b> I have worked,<br \/>\n lived and rolled about this lovely planet from a very young age and in<br \/>\n fact just back from a magazine shoot in Rio. I&#8217;m nearly sixty five, still<br \/>\n alive, my get up and go has not completely got up and gone and like good<br \/>\n whisky I&#8217;m still going strong.  If you would like to contact Tony, his<br \/>\n e-mail address is:  &#x74;&#x6f;&#x6e;&#x79;&#x40;&#x61;&#x6e;&#x6e;&#x69;&#x73;&#x2e;&#x63;&#x6f;&#x2e;&#x75;&#x6b;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was 31o C and a cold one slipped easily down my throat. The cyclists were lying in the hot sun, and yet this was still England. We were awaiting&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"css_class_manager_body_classes":"","css_class_manager_use_in_post_loop":false},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","category-main-article","tag-april-2003"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Cataluna Chill Out by Tony Annis - eNewsletter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/globetrotters.co.uk\/newsletter\/cataluna-chill-out-by-tony-annis.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Cataluna Chill Out by Tony Annis - eNewsletter\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It was 31o C and a cold one slipped easily down my throat. 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