Last month two of us rode Trafalgar to Trafalgar South to North over 15 days. There was quite a bit of chat about it on the Auk Facebook group but as that tends to disappear quite quickly I thought I'd post our route here. We found route info online quite hard, well impossible to find and spent a long time planning the route so hopefully it'll show up on searches for future riders if we post it here.
This link goes to a route which is all my days from Strava joined up. It includes all the little loops finding food in towns and any little mistakes we made so it shouldn't be followed exactly but 99% of it is good.
https://ridewithgps.com/trips/37184236As a write up the below is a copy and Paste from Facebook, hopefully it makes a bit of sense on here.
It’s hard to know where to start with a ride of this length, it’s hard to remember all the days in the right order and almost impossible to describe all the different landscapes, incredible views and emotional highs and lows of so many hours and days in the saddle.
We flew to Jerez in the bottom SW corner of Spain with our bikes in cardboard boxes wearing old clothes. We built our bikes, binned the clothes and rode just short of 100km down to Cape Trafalgar before setting off on the Audax proper on the Sunday.
Our Brevet cards were actually Brevet Books and had controls across Spain, Andorra and France that were all strategically placed to ensure we rode some tough and spectacular roads to link them. Most of our days were over 200km with the odd slightly shorter one to try and ensure a longer evenings rest every now and then. Our shortest day, other than the last 100km in England was 107 miles, our longest 156 miles. We basically had 14 x 200km days in a row.
The official routesheet we were given several months ago was the same basic one that was produced when the ride was first put together in 1985, a list of towns with the number of the road linking them. Many of the roads had either been upgraded to motorways or become pretty disused since then. I spent more time than is healthy on Ride with GPS and google streetview plotting our route and we left with all 15 stages plotted in our GPSs from hotel to hotel.
We crossed Spain over 9 days travelling from the bottom SW corner to the top NE border with Andorra. We rode through rugged mountain terrain in the south, mile upon mile of deserted hills and olive groves in Central Spain. We narrowly escaped getting into serious hydration problems on Day 4 after 100km in the absolute middle of nowhere with nowhere to fill water bottles and 40 degree heat. We were saved by an official building at a dam after miles and miles of nothing but lizards, deer, the odd snake and Vultures up above us. I banged on a locked door and after a while a guy opened it to a mad Englishman waving an empty water bottle. He smiled and gestured me inside to a water cooler. Never have we been so pleased to fill our bottles.
We visited the famous windmills at Consuegra, we had a control at Toledo, a world heritage site and we rode a brilliant cycle path for about 10 miles into Madrid.
On day 7 after an overnight stop in the beautiful old town of Siguenza we spent the morning riding down an endless limestone gorge on a perfectly smooth winding rode with each bend bringing an even more amazing view than the previous one.
We rode through Lleida which is very close to where we ride on our April club trips and the roads had a really familiar feel.
We left Spain on Day 9 and climbed through Andorra before a long evening descent down into France.
Our route through France was basically directly North. What we hadn’t expected was to be riding in some of the hottest temperatures that had ever been recorded there. We ended up riding very slowly so we didn’t overheat, we had a policy of stopping at the first opportunity we had to fill our bottles as soon as we started to drink our second bottle. This would sometimes be after only 30km in temperatures in the mid forties.
Day 11 turned into one of the hardest of the trip. It was up and down from one valley to the next, we climbed over 4000 metres and covered 146 miles in 40 degrees. I was a proper mess at the end arriving at our hotel in Mauriac at 8pm having left Albi at 6am. To top the day off all restaurants and shops had closed and we ended up in a pokey kebab shop, not ideal for Vegan Matt.
We had been aiming for the midnight ferry on Saturday night and after a long 156 mile day including going right through Paris from South to North it felt pretty surreal to finally reach Dieppe.
It’s hard to summarise the trip really, most days we became focused on the next 50km, the next place we could get food or fill our bottles. We both had periods sitting on each others wheel with seriously low energy levels but strangely we never seemed to be both at a low at the same time. I had plenty of periods where I could happily spin my pedals but there was no way I could properly put any power through them at all. My strategy the whole ride was to keep it steady at all times as I had no way of knowing how I would be after so many repeated long days.
We completed the route in 15 days, there was a 16 day limit so we always had a spare day in case of any unforeseen delay. We covered 3100km (1925 miles) and climbed 36,500 metres. We had one puncture the whole trip and other than minor gear tweeks no mechanicals all trip.
Massive thanks to Matt. We both had our ups and downs and ‘moments’ as could be expected over such a distance but we both had the same attitude and I couldn’t have had a better riding partner.