Fair Weather Bikers

Despite being in a nice comfortable bed I had the worse nights sleep of the entire trip. I kept waking up every hour or so then struggling to get back to sleep. At 7am I decided to read for a bit, then I had a shower at 9am and went to load the bike, only to discover my rear tyre was completely flat. It turned out the tyre had what looked like a large metal staple in it - I guessed I'd picked it up in the road works the day before.

I returned to the room, Daz was getting up so I told him what had happened. We decided to have breakfast and then sort it out.

Luckily there was a tyre place no more than Ľ of a mile down the road from the hotel, so I thought if I could get some air in the tyre I could ride it down there and see if they could repair or replace the tyre. The hotel owner leant us a hand pump and luckily the tyre did hold air long enough for me to ride it that short distance. The guy in the tyre shop repaired the tyre in around 10 minutes and it only cost me 10 euros! I was very relieved and also pleased that this had happened in Andorra rather than any of our other stops, as Andorra has more bike and tyre shops per mile than any other place I know of!

We packed the bikes and set off out of Andorra at around 11am. The ride out of Andorra was very hot and quite tedious as we had to get through all the road works - luckily without picking up another puncture!

Once out of Andorra we were back into the mountains heading to Sort. The road from Andorra to Sort is one me and Nig did last year and also one of my favourite roads in the world. It did not disappoint. The scenery was breathtaking and the road was very good. The surface was not perfect but it was consistent and didn't have piles of gravel everywhere. It was nice to be able to ride probably again.

We stopped part way to Sort in a lay-by to take some photos. Walking through the grass Daz noticed things moving and looked down. With each step crickets were jumping out of the way – the grass was covered with hundreds of the little blighters. I don't know if I stepped on any - I like to think they all managed to jump out of the way at the last minute!

Once past Sort the road dropped off the mountain and became fast with sweeping bends - again very enjoyable. We stopped in a very small village and found a nice sheltered bar, so we got out of the sweltering sun and had a nice cold coke.

The road then headed back into the mountains, but instead of going over them we were going through huge rock valleys. It was incredible but unfortunately there were no places to stop and take pictures.

The road took us around a stunning turquoise lake before we got to the village where the GPS thought our camp-site was at around 2:30pm. The camp-site turned out to be a couple of miles out of the village which took a little bit of finding, but it was very nice, next to a small river with lots of trees to provide very welcome shade.

We pitched the tents then went for an ice-cream. We order the bread for the following days breakfast and then jumped on the bikes to go back and have a better look at the lake. The whole area was beautiful and I would love to go back and spend more time there.

We returned to the tents and chilled out. Daz went to sleep and I read my book. I had a walk up to a bar I had seen just outside the camp-site to see if they did food and discovered you could have a 3 course meal with a bottle of wine for 16.50 each which I thought would do nicely! I returned, had a shower and chilled out.

Daz got up at around 8pm, had a shower and we headed up-to the bar for our meal. The meal was fantastic, and despite the fact that the owner didn't speak a word of English he tried very hard to make us feel welcome. I had chicken and Daz had rabbit both of which were very nice.

We finished off the meal with a couple of beers and returned to the tents at around midnight feeling very content.