Halloween and November 1st!

　
Hi friends and family (or let's be real, it's just family at this point :). This is Amie finally reporting for blog duty after a several-week hiatus. Currently we're sitting in our hostel room in Girona, Spain. How we managed to get here is actually a bit of a funny tale, but I'll start with yesterday I suppose.

We woke up in Perpignan to buffet breakfast (YES) and the best weather we've seen in a while. In fact, Perpignan has a street entirely lined with palm trees, which are a rather re-assuring change of scenery. We biked out of the city without a problem and started cruising toward Spain! For most of this ride we had one of the worst headwinds we've encountered yet, a bullying wind that seemed to get you from all sides at once. Lucky for us there wasn't really another town between Perpignan and Figueres for us to wimp out and stay in, so we battled the wind resolutely and biked on. The Pyrenees (sp? i've seen this word written in French, Spanish and Catalan recently so I forgot what English calls them) form the border between France and Spain, but we were close enough to the coast that we were really just in the foothills. We climbed gradually up and up from Perpignan until we hit the border town of Le Perthus. From there it was mostly a descent all the way into Figueres, rounding off the ride a bit over 60 km. The scenery out here is amazing - the mountains, foothills and palm trees remind me a lot of the mountainous regions of southern and central California. Also, I did notice that while the language had definitely changed, it was NOT Spanish.... Turns out we're in Cataluna (squiggle on top of the n, pronounced "catalunya"), which is still Spain but they speak Catalan here (looks like french and italianized-spanish). The buildings changed a bit too - more stucco and terra-cotta like one would expect. In Figueres there is no hostel, but we found a nice cheap hotel called Hotel Europa. Then we went on a failed laundromat mission (our situation was getting SERIOUS) - unfortunately it turned out that our laundromat didn't exist... Since it was Sunday, and the sunday before All-Saints-Day, no grocery stores were open, so we had some dinner in town and hit the sack. Overall great first impression of Spain.

Today has been a bit funnier. This morning we took a roundabout, 56 km ride from Figueres into Girona. Farmland. Stucco. Pretty clouds. Erin led us basically the whole way. I LOVE her for that, just absolutely love her. We hit Girona just after noon. We knew today was going to be rather hip-hoppin' because it's all-saints-day (Spanish Halloween I suppose, without the crappy candy and scary costumes), but it turns out Girona was HIP HIPPITY HOPPIN'. The downtown streets were teeming with Catalunan hordes perusing art and food stands. Based on our extremely technical assessment of our hostel's location (we glanced at google maps and "put it in our minds") we were pretty sure that our hostel was smack-dab in the middle of the commotion. So there we were with three loaded bikes waddling through disgruntled Spanish crowds and apologizing incriminatingly in English and cracking up, when people started telling us sentences that definitely included the words "bicicleta" "gente" and "impossible" in them. Getting the hint, we turned around, I asked a man where our hostel was, and we managed to find it via a parallel street that wasn't so chaotic. THEN WE DID OUR LAUNDRY. thank god. Currently we're having a siesta, but tonight hopefully we'll hit the town (in honor of the saints, of course). In fact, when we asked the hostel receptionist what there was to do tonight, he told us to come back 10 minutes later so he could properly inform us. We're going to assume that means there's SO much going on he wanted to get it all straight.

And that's life. I'm happy to be in Spain to use my Spanish instead of my rather pathetic French. I think we're all feeling a little burnt out on traveling and dealing with foreign...everything. I mean, we just spent Halloween without a single Reese's peanut butter cup. Then again, I saw a palm tree today, and there's no better way to give your persective a good workout than to deal with some new things. Tomorrow we're going to hit the coast and hopefully find some beautiful beaches a days ride north of Barcelona!
Much love from all of us!