Another year, another trip!

Preparation time - only 13 days before we leave!

In our usual last-minute style we have finally pulled our bikes out of Winter storage and hatched a cunning travel plan for 2015. What with lack of holidays / other commitments, we've had to keep it brief this year squeezing 12 days out of just 6 days of Annual Leave (incl. a Bank Holiday). Originally our 'plan' was to cross Wales, get the boat to Ireland, do the West and North before heading across to the Islands of Scotland. This seemed a bit dull and the thought of all the April / May wet weather had us thinking again. Thanks to some very reasonable Brittany Ferries 'économie' services from Portsmouth to Santander, Spain sounded like a better idea - and the Pyrenees have got to be worth exploring properly.

 The plan?

1 x Yamaha XT660Z Tenere (Spiro)
1 x Honda XL600V Transalp (Dino)
2 x Human Beings (Spiro/Dino)
2 x Tents
2,000 - 3,000km to cover in 12 days (very lame for us)

We're catching the early evening ferry from Portsmouth arriving in Santander about 24hr later. We plan to head past Bilbao and into Pamplona before heading into the Pyrenees. We aim to follow the N260 road pretty much all the way to the Mediterranean sea camping along the way and hopefully doing some 'off-road' trails. We aim to do a flying visit of Barcelona before turning back and returning via Montserrat, the Spaghetti-Western desert that is 'Bardenas Reales' and finally the Picos de Europa mountains which come highly recommended to us.

Distances are likely to be a pretty lame 100 miles/160 km to 250 miles/400 km per day which will make this a proper easy trip compared to some of my earlier iron-butt endurance trips.

The bikes are unchanged from last year's trip. We'll be servicing them next week but won't be doing any other work on them - we'll still be running the same tyres as last year. That said I did fit a new chain/sprockets after last year's struggle to complete the journey on my very sick chain - oh and I fitted some little spot lights as the Tenere high-beam is crap. Oh, I also have a bigger Airhawk seat as the little one I bought was pretty useless.

As always we intend to be mostly self-sufficient and wild-camp - thus we'll be carrying a lot of gear again. At least this time I have a new warm sleeping bag and Dino now has one which didn't used to belong to a (short) child.

As distances are small, we won't necessarily stick to the plan and should have enough time to do some exploring and relax. Not sure what the weather will be like, but no doubt we will have some rain and we're not expecting too much heat - especially as it's April/May and we'll be up in the mountains for much of our time.

Can't wait. 13 days and counting.......