Bordeaux & Girona Sept 2024

Little did we know, but Girona was hosting the Sea Otter Europe Bike Races & Festival Sept 20-22. That explains why we’ve seen so many bikers here all in the same outfits.

I especially liked seeing several girls with UAE shirts (United Arab Emirates) all decked out in high quality biking gear, but with head scarves under their helmets. Good on them.

We headed out early morning to La Commune, a breakfast / lunch place around the corner that’s a fav for bikers. It was packed, but we managed to find seats and breakfast was delish.

From there we headed to the train station - I’d successfully booked our train tickets from here to Gare du Lyon in Paris for next Sunday, and reserved our seats, but it said we had to print out the seat reservations. Such a pain - who carries a printer with them ☹️.

At the train station they said they couldn’t print the tickets and sent us to a nearby shop. The grouchy man there said it would cost 30. I assumed 30 euros - YIKES $45 😖. I quickly checked my Visa card and realized it was $1.50 - obviously lost in translation. . . . Don’t understand why the email showing QR codes for our booked seats wasn’t enough. Oh well. ..

From there we searched out the Saturday market in the park - colourful & active per usual - and found a work out station that was my kind of place - open air & easy. While there we heard lots of noise coming from across the water, but didn’t know why.

Heading back, we noticed market stalls set up on the bridges. One shop caught my eye - small bags with unique designs. Fortunately the artist spoke English so we had a delightful conversation with him as he explained how & why he created each of his designs. I rarely purchase anything, but bought a tiny pouch to hold coins - great memento.

Next stop was a local bike shop called 21 and another fun conversation ensued. Seems this young British girl had come here 4 years ago with her bike and never left. She’s now married to a Gironian and was a wonderful source of info about the city and all the bike trails.

She was the one who told us about Sea Otter Europe, the 8th annual biking festival in Girona - 6000+ participants and races for both competitive and amateur bikers, also a huge exhibition with the best biking brands on the market. It was quite the scene.

The major race was 100K uphill - the winners did it in 4 hours. As they’d started at 10 and we arrived there about 2:00, we were able to see some of the front runners passing by.

As luck would have it, we’d unintentionally wandered onto the biking path, so I got some pics of the bikers heading into their final 1 K. One of the organizers, hustled us off the path, but also explained more about the event. The pics & video capture is better than I can explain.

Heading home we paused for beers at Indépendance Square, then searched Sunset Jazz Club around the corner from our place - will check that out next week.

Another GREAT dayRead more