To bike away the pain....
Mood:  not sure
Topic: Ruminations
On Friday night I went out on a great date with a great guy who's perfect in all senses. And being the fatalist that I am (I'm accepting that more as I get older), I have a really sneaking suspicion that any attraction that's there is totally one-sided on my behalf and that three weeks from now, I'm going to be looking for another guy who isn't afraid of (literally) riding off into the sunset.

I know that I'm going to know by Thursday night. I know that the call will go unreturned, that the e-mail is going to get deleted once he sees who it's from. I know that on Friday, when we head down to Jaen, I'm going to be thinking about him incessantly and that there'll be nothing I can do, 'cause I'm gonna be in the mountains in northern Spain, and he's going to be in the Pyrenees, and I shouldn't even bother bringing my phone 'cause I'm going to end up being with the two people I talk to most anyway.

Does anyone else ride to take away the pain? It's the one advantage I have that few of my friends ride as much as I do. More than once, I have gotten on the bike for an hour, two hours, three hours at a time to ride through the pain, to force myself into a kind of rhythm where I can sublimate the pain and loneliness, or push it out through the pedals. Maybe this is what anorexics feel they're doing when they purge.

And I don't want to think that this relationship - for what little it's been so far - is going to go south, but it's hard to keep my spirits up and hope that something will come of this when the track record so far has been so sucky. So I keep riding, for the same reason I keep writing. At the end of some days, it feels like words and the bike are the only things I can always count on, like it's all that I've got that gives me any consistency, and that I can control.

So if the message isn't returned, the number doesn't come back on my cell phone, I'll do what I what I always do. I'll go somewhere quiet and listen to Macy Gray and Cassandra Wilson and I'll mourn. I'll give myself the requisite hour to feel bad, which is all I permit myself anymore (otherwise it's just too much time in a day) and then I'll go and either write or ride. (Those words sound too much alike. Coincidence?) Because at the end of the day, I can count on the fact that those will make me feel better.

OK, back to packing for the trip.

We're gettin'HYPED for Semana Santa
Mood:  cheeky
Wanna know what the best...OK, maybe not the total best, but one of the Top 10 thing is about Living in Spain? Number Four: Everybody gets March break here. Except that March break is in April, and sometimes it's even in late April, when the weather starts to get good.

And I've got cabin fever to get out and to hit the road.

How much would you pay for someone to tell you where to go?
Mood:  caffeinated
I like my job. I really do. And I have to say that 70% of the time, I like the clients, too: The clients can be really cool people. But note the use of the word CAN.

Most touring companies offer two types of tours: guided and self-guided options. Guided tours are the ones where you basically do nothing but get on the bike and ride from A to B. You may have a chance to choose what you're having for lunch or dinner, and you may have the option of doing a bit more riding once the basic riding for the day is done. Essentially, though, you pay those big bucks because you don't want to have to make decisions; you're paying us to make the decisions for you. And most of the time, this is a system that works.

Where we seem to get the most trouble, however, is when clients confuse guided with self-guided; On a self-guided tour, you're more or less on your own. You pay us to give you the maps and the bikes, to do the hotel reservations and to make sure that the hotel gives you something resembling breakfast every morning. But we don't do much more than that.

This is why people choose the self-guided option: You are responsible for getting your butt from A to B. You buy your own lunches, you can choose which route you'd like to go, but we're not going to tell you that you definitively have to take the left fork if the right one looks more appealing and gets you to your hotel before sundown. If you want to take the bus one day rather than ride, that's your own business.

That, in a nutshell, is the way you save half the price on a cycle tour: You are not paying for me to tell you when you have to get up in the morning, not to tell you not to ride during the hottest hours of the day. You're not paying me to know the date when a certain altar was built, how many times Velazquez was married, what you're supposed to do when your tire goes flat halfway up O Cebreiro. That's the reason why you're paying half of what you would pay on a guided tour. You are paying for your own independence, instead of having me shepherd you around. Why? Because there are a lot of cyclists who only want the infrastructure, not the herding; for lack of a better way to put it, cyclists who don';t need to be told what to do.

The reason why I'm writing about this today is that we have two groups of clients who either haven't gotten the idea of why it';s self-guided (why they're paying ?950 a head, not ?1450) or haven't been bothered to read their e-mails. One is a pair of families coming over from San Francisco who want to go biking in Gerona in July. The other is a pair of families who are coming from San Francisco who are going to go biking in Andalusia in a couple of weeks.

It has gotten to the point that I'm hesitant to open Outlook every morning because I don';t know what kind of stupid-ass question I';m going to get hit with THIS time. If you choose the self-guided option, you choose what kind of wine you're having for lunch, how to wash the snot out of your cycling gloves. You know why your knees hurt - because no one has to tell you NOT to wear Air Jordans on a bike.

To be honest, I'd be thrilled to bits if we ended up doing away with the guided tours and only offered self-guided options; or even if we put together self-guided options for people a la carte. But there's a limit to the service economy, spoke folk, and you don't get something for nothing. Or for very little.

March 20th - Back in the saddle
Mood:  not sure
Topic: Ruminations
Runners who are especially dedicated to running talk about the "runner's high" - a Zen-like state which allows them to basically zone out and think of nothing but the task at hand when they're out running. It's what I need now, but the truth is, I've been parked in front of my laptop for six hours, working on the website and the blog.

I had a rough weekend. It got off on the wrong foot on Friday when my editor at the local paper had a (fully justified) go at me for being exceptionally late with an article... and then to top it off, I had words with my boss about whether e-mails should be written in bullet points or in full sentences. (What can I say? I'm a former ESL teacher. Bullet points are for wimps who can't handle their non-defining relative clauses.) First time out in three months on Friday night (watch dem gin&tonix); ran into an old boss; the guy I hit on hasn't called me; superhangover on Saturday; then another sarcastic e-mail from the editor this morning about the article. And it struck me yesterday that, for the little money I get writing for this particular paper, I might as well strike out on my own and do my own thing.

So here it is. I'm not saying that it's going to be the best blog you've ever read in your life, but I hope it proves to be informative and fun, that it inspires you to get back on your bike and to travel around - one of the greatest uses of bikes...and you don't have to pay some guy in Boston tons of money to set you up with a trip. Between the website and the blog, I hope to provide people who want to travel by bike with some practical information on how to get across Spain on two wheels. Obviously, those of you who are dedicated cycle tourists aren't going to sweat the small stuff; you're used to sleeping rough in forests, camping, fixing flats in the middle of nowhere.

And I'll give you the inside line on what it's like to have one of those terminally cool jobs - cycle touring guide. It is a cool job, but it's a hard one, what with having to manage personalities, a boss who's having his first go at being a boss (and has some days which are better than others) and all the other technical stuff which doesn't flip you out when you're on your own, but which takes an especially cool head when you've got a whiny housewife from Florida, two teenagers itching to take the bike apart, and a couple who got into a little too much vino tinto at lunch. It's fun, but I would be lying if I said it was all fun and games. Sometimes the funny stuff doesn't come through until six months later, when you hear from a colleague that they had to dig the dad out of a ditch in the Dordogne because he fell off the road while riding drunk....or the whiny housewife walked off a tour of Ireland because she didn't realize that, whoops, Ireland is hilly....just like the Camino de Santiago is.

At any rate, I promise to keep THIS blog current. I promise to include as much information on biking in Spain - road racing, mountain biking, commuting - as much as I can; and, through the website, I'll do my best to keep you up to date on the development on new routes, new laws and new tendencies on biking in Spain.