welcome to the first episode or first ride day of bike packing through spain we're starting things
off on this lovely main road out of alicante but we have our own special road just for cyclists
see very good special road very good weather's a little bit fresh this morning as you can probably
tell by the jules that we're wearing but it's still better than uk summer so
happy days we still got arms and legs out we've got 140k to do today and 650 meters of elevation
which probably turn out to be more legs feeling good i can see sun on the horizon
i'm happy you happy i'm always happy mate never trust a man who's always happy
on the menu today the classic strawberry straws zero gluten kilimanjaro what have these got to
do with kilimanjaro nice guy is that even how you've spoken in manchester kilimanja
they're singleton they've written sing gluten on the packet six times i like these things
when you're bike packing because because they fit a food pouch like this one here perfectly
on a bike now easy to eat and hold and you don't make your hands sticky there's not enough reasons
primo bike packing food they're not very good for your teeth i can't eat them at the moment
my people really hot they're too hard for my new teeth oh you know your viewers don't know
chris was very excited to tell me he's got new teeth now and i had three operations to sort out
some stuff in here which was uh from an old rugby injury from when i was
yeah a lot younger so you've got your teeth done like richard ahmad do i have richard hammond smile
they look great mate did you catch laurence by the way i think no i haven't caught him
i think he's around the corner yeah i think he is so we rode out of alicante
pretty flat slightly but now we're heading to mercier stop there for lunch quite a big climb
it's probably like i don't know 400 meters let's say big time it's big compared to the
rest of the day it's a climbing and then a big descent to the seaside again to carter
please forgive our pronounced announcements for everything
hey chris yes francis snake
very good
this is a glorious lunch isn't it i was going through some
in secret dark times the way you were kind of going really food quite bluntly was said a lot
thanks for my coffee the problem is mercier was well it wasn't what i was expecting i was
thinking it would be a nice nice you know spanish town with cafes but it was like in the center it
was like the vegas strip and then just industrial sort of business park stuff which in the end meant
we could get food from a supermarket which wasn't so bad one of the things about spain is the mecca
donna bread all the food is better than the uk all the food in there all the stuff you can buy
in the supermarkets here it's fresher than the stuff you get in the uk it just tastes great
this is very good quite a poor showing from chris didn't even finish his bread
now we have the biggest climb of the day which is about 400 meters it's not huge but it's proper
switchbacks and everything and goes into and then the descent goes out of a national park in fact a
lot of this trip and the route that we're doing does that loads of national parks which is cool
because they're lovely and empty and picturesque picturesque i'm skinny skinny ah yeah they're
skinny i love a bit skinny so i made a bit of an error like yesterday's video went out and
sometimes the message that i'm trying to get across doesn't always come across doesn't
always come across and the video kind of made it look like lawrence was going to be joining us
on this trip you may have noticed from today's video that he's not actually here
we were just hanging out with him because he's got a villa in calpe where he's doing
your standard training camp sort of trip away from the cold uk weather which means it is just us two
and we miss lawrence lots and lots we wish he was here with us but unfortunately we'll
have to wait till the next time uh for him to join us i think he's a bit jealous to be honest
because this is the best way of getting some volume in i think we get to see a lot of a country
as opposed to being in one base we just get to explore surely that's what cycling is all
about anyway isn't it i think so i think um when you're riding around in calpe it is fantastic and
if you've never been there before and you want to spend some time away from the nasty weather
in winter then it's a fantastic location to go the thing is though i've been
probably eight times i know all the roads i've ridden them lots of times
and uh sometimes it's nice to just do something different even though this kind of trip is a
million times more expensive a million times more stressful there's a lot of uh
plates to spin doing this yeah but you create memories that you remember for a very long time
which is why it's worth it like this lovely time like this beautiful climb and this very nice
driver that waited behind us for ages i can see there chris that it gets very steep so i'm going
to put this camera away see you in a bit i think it's just is it out hold up hey let's push through
i like how we've gone from the most beautiful national park i've seen in my life to a brown
sheep t-rex territory mate t-rex territory oh is that what we keep it yeah we have now
done big climb lovely descent quite straight descent actually so we covered loads of ground
and now well i think on the distance there where the god light is now it should be a nice smooth
uneventful running into the town i hope we can find a pizza there
oh no yes i don't want tapas it's too small so the cool thing that happened
when i did the last bike packing trip with jimmy which was five days long or six days long and
he ended up getting sick in the end so we did a little bit less but that was a fantastic beginners
bike packing trip that i think is very achievable for most people on a bike and the amazing thing
about that is that whoa there's a wild goat and he's not on a string and the amazing thing is
that some of you guys actually went and did the trip or very similar to it so i think this trip
is kind of the next level on top of that one so it's a little bit longer the days are a little
bit longer you have to stay on top of fueling and bits and bobs like that a little bit more
to make sure you get through it successfully and comfortably and hopefully in these videos we can
cover some of that stuff how long we're stopping what we're fueling with and how we're getting
through it day to day and um should give you an idea if you'd like to tackle something similar
yourself once again we are in a similar part of spain so it's all quite safe and uh quite a nice
entry to bike packing as well so if you uh want to replicate this i will put it all into it's
all in a commute thing isn't it a new collection we'll figure that out and put a link somewhere
and then hopefully we finish left oh this is a big road but there's no cars on it
mini trees yeah right we have just been to what can only be described as the best restaurant in
the whole of spain the most healthy lovely veggie food better than the pizza that i wanted earlier
but the portions were kind of small so we're going to lidl stocking up on some supplies
gonna get some of that electrolyte drink um we have this aquarius here which is like orange or
they do another lemony flavor i think which has got electrolyte inside so you can put it in your
bottles or you can just sip it um overnight which is what i'm gonna do so i'm nice and hydrated
tomorrow i would like to give a shout out to wherever the dinner what was it called moma momo
that marks the end of today's episode there'll be another one tomorrow so stay tuned for that
we're gonna do a q a at some point bike packing related so if you have any questions
put them in the comment section down below thank you for watching and see you guys tomorrow