Friday March 14, 2014, 78 miles (126 km) – Total so far: 669 miles (1,077 km)

March 13, 2014: 41 miles We woke to another day of gusty headwinds. Our goal was to get around the large city of Almeria and find a small road around the nearby cape. The climbing was easy but working the headwinds four days in a row really wore us down. We rode away from the coast to stay on the smaller roads and entered desert country around a Spanish national park. How we ever found our way is amazing as we were using my Garmin GPS, Jocelyn’s new map app from our warmshowers.com host Fernando, and our paper map. We stopped at a gas station for a soda and asked the attendant who explained in Spanish how to find our way back to the coast. It then all made sense and we were where we wanted to be. It was simply amazing with lots of guesswork. Around sunset we saw an old Spanish fort to investigate and next door was a very cool hostel in the tiny village of Los Escullos. We celebrated with a bottle of delicious white wine.

March 14, 2014: 37 miles It was a day of much climbing with the winds finally calming. We once again navigated our way inland along small roads and continued east up the coast along another national park. After lunch we had a huge climb over a fantastic engineering feat of a road leaving the town of Carboneras. I can’t remember the last time I worked my legs so hard. We soon conquered this climb then tackled four more climbs around headlands and canyons to our destination of Mojacar Playa. We heard that Spain is the second most mountainous country in Europe behind Switzerland. On the coast one climbs the headland, drops down in a canyon, and then climbs another headland. It’s hard but exhilarating.