Barcelona to Elche

The interactive map of the route

Having hit the sack in the wee small hours of the morning, I wasn't exactly anxious to leap out of bed at the crack of the farting sparrow. However, Breakfast tempted me back into my riding kit and downstairs, and I was able to entertain myself with the Spanish interpretation of the universal pan-global Holiday-Inn Express buffet breakfast.



As I ate my fill, I realised that the next table was conspicuously full of BMW personnel, all wearing 'Boxer Cup' T-shirts. Race mechanics, I deduced. The Montmelo Holiday Inn Express is slap bang adjacent to the Catalunya GP circuit, in the middle of the industrial estate that surrounds this motorcycle-racing mecca. Indeed, I'd hoped to take a look round the circuit the previous evening, had I been there. But this morning, when I checked out of the hotel and started loading the bike, my interest was even more piqued. There was a lone 4-stroke (definitely) MotoGP bike (I think) being absolutely thrashed around the circuit - the sound was amazing. Putting that together with the BMW mechanics, and my guess is that Jezza 'Belfast' McWilliams was hammering the BMW MotoGP test mule around the Catalunya circuit. Sadly, it remains a guess - I tried to find a way into the circuit, but all the gates I could find were firmly locked, so I had to admit defeat and head West, leaving the giant industrial estate that surrounds the race track and heading for the coastal autopista.

I had planned today that I would take a scenic route, along the old coast road. However, with my clutch in a parless state, I had no choice but to stick to the Autopista Mediterraneo. In hindsight, I probably didn't miss much apart from traffic jams and tourist tat, but I'd have liked to find that out for myself.

A Spanish Service Area... Hot, dry and smelly. This service area was representative of the whole Northern Spanish mediterranean coast, then. A local biker was just pulling in as I took this shot. You can see my patent 'Don't screw up - Keep Right!' hieroglyphic attached to the inside of the screen on the GS.

Leaving Barcelona on the toll motorway, I found moderate traffic around the city, and some not over long queues at the toll plazas (I gained the impression that Spanish motorway tolls are much fiercer for bikes than French ones). When I later stopped for petrol and was chatting to a local, he was bemoaning the hideous traffic engulfing Barcelona and the demands for a better road network; I suspect that if they had to deal with the M25 every day, there would have been a revolution already. It was also a feature of my entire long and circuitous trip through Europe that I was consistently passing evidence of road building and upgrade projects; the sort of useful infrastructure-creation activity that we seem to have entirely given up on in the UK.

Although while building roads apace, outside the city limits they seem to have neglected to invest in a sewage system - as every time the autopista bridged an open watercourse, the only natural features scarring the barren landscape, the unsubtle aroma of raw sewage stewing in forty degree heat invaded my helmet. Mmm... lovely.

A roadsign? Yep, about the only interesting feature of the hot, dry, sewage-tainted run from Barcelona to Elche was... a sign pointing out the exit for the venue of next year's Americas Cup. One for the yachties, more than me, but... Picture taken from a service area near Valencia.

After a late start, the deliberately short itinerary for the day, coupled with tankful-at-a-time Autopista bashing, meant that I was making good time.

(Yet )An(other) Autopista toll plaza. Yes, the Spanish know how to properly soak users of the Autopista Mediterraneo.

The Kilometres are mounting... ...and I'm still not halfway across Spain yet. That Max Speed looks very restrained, but I'd not long reset it from a glitch-induced 5,000+ km/h.

Eventually the autopista took me past Alicante, and past a bizarre expat oasis nearby where all the signs visible from the road as I flew by were in english. As I homed in on Elche, cranes began to dominate the horizon, and there were new motorway junctions being carved out of the terrain. The hotel was, I knew, on another industrial estate outside the town. A deliberate choice on my part, since I really didn't want to be in a tourist hotel, thank you very much, and that part of the world was full of them.

It was only as I got to within a mile of the hotel that it went a bit wrong. The industrial park was brand spanking new. Newer than the map of it in my GPS. And they had built everything about half a kilometre away from where they had originally planned to put it. As a result, I spent about 20 minutes riding round the one way system from hell, traversing the grid of identical industrial units, following a GPS pointer that was sadly misguided. Even when I twigged that it wasn't making sense and sought directions in the local petrol station, it still took me twenty minutes of fighting the one way system to get to where I now knew the hotel was. Once I'd checked in, the only legal way of getting to the side entrance to the secure underground car-park from the front driveway where I'd temporarily stopped was a mile long tour of the industrial estate.

I opted for a slightly more pragmatic approach :-).

The Holiday Inn Elche is a large, airy, very flash and new air conditioned hotel, and my bike was very lonely in the empty underground car park. I soon discovered that the only other guests were... two entire coachloads of firm, toned, athletic, very skimpily attired teenage girls who were trying out for a volleyball team.

No photos, sadly, I was far too busy letching.

And so, to bed.




X-posted to khaylock, uk_bikers, motorcycles

Coming next: Faro...