I rode 67 miles today and climbed 5500 feet. That was the easy part. The constant strong, gusty - 10 to 20 mph - wind was the hard part. It caused me some hard riding,, and made the ride much longer. It took me seven hours and twenty minutes to do a little more than a metric century.

Cranking uphill into the wind with trucks and buses passing me as a I fought to keep going and not to crash was NOT fun. Several times I came within inches of crashing, mostly because of gusts from vehicles, and once a wind gust was so strong I was barely able to keep my bike on the pavement. The pavement was almost always excellent today, but it had a nasty drop off at the edge, so going off meant going down.

Pilgrims often have their own road

Here is what my road looked like most of the day

And here is the, pretty, top of typical climb

I am on the main pilgrim route to Santiago, so I saw a lot of bikes and a lot more pilgrims on foot. It felt like Spain's equivalent of the Danau Radweg, but it was much harder ridng. I did roughly three days worth of bike pilgrim - maybe six days of foot pilgrim - mileage today, and going east is harder than going west, but I'm still impressed with the difficulty of the pilgrim's riding (or walking) this route. There is at least one 800 foot plus climb and lots of 500 foot climbs. The folks riding to Santiago are mostly inexperience bike tourists and it must be very difficult for them to get up those hills and fight that wind.

This is very pretty country

And a very nice, if hilly, bicycling road

I was passed by one 'real' tourist. He was a guy from Lyon who was riding from Santiago back to Lyon. I'd guess that to be about 1000 miles. He overtook me around noon and left me in the dust on a big hill before Aruza when I stopped for lunch about 12:30. It was good as were my snack stops, but I developed indigestion again this afternoon. I guess, sniff, sniff!, I better give up espresso!

Palas de Rei
The road goes through town and over the ridge behind it, you can see the notch in the trees!

Last night I went to bed at 9 PM and this morning I got up at 7:40. I needed that kind of bed time to recover from yesterday's ride. Today's was much harder! Maybe I'll take a rest day. Maybe I'll investigate other way of getting to Santander. My planned route goes north-northeast and the wind is pretty much from the north, todays route was east, so I'm not sure I can make the ~100 km to the coast. I'm also not sure that the wind on the coast won't be worse than the wind here...

Lugo, a big city, but at least it is in a valley!

Last night I slept in a 75 E hotel room. The night before I slept in a free dorm for pilgrims, and tonight I'm in a 15 E hostal 'cell.' It is just big enough for me and my bike and has no outside window. It also has poor sound insulation and I have some noisy neighbors, so this may not have been a good idea ;-{, but it does add another housing experience and it is cheap!