Wednesday, September 1, 2021

Laguardia

Bike Route: Vitoria-Gasteiz to Laguardia, 30 miles, 3400 feet of climb

Thunder booms and lightning crackles woke us at 5:00 this morning. By 9:00, the rain had settled into a quiet gray patter and we were pushing our bikes out the door, onto the elevator, and out to the street. Wearing our raincoats and rain pants, we made our way sedately out of the city on bike paths and trails, onto a scenic highway headed south and east. After a half hour or so, the rain stopped, we shed the raingear, and we traded the highway for a gravel road that wound its way through several quiet hamlets, farms, and fields.

The last couple hours were a grind up two fairly steep mountain passes. When we came over the top of the second one, the view was breathtaking. We rode the brakes down hairpins as steep as 14 percent, turned left onto another small highway, and made our way east to Laguardia, a very small walled city at the top of a hill. The streets are incredibly narrow, lined with stone-and-timber buildings from the middle ages.

We were starving when we got here, so we stopped just outside the city wall for a three-course lunch. After checking in to our guesthouse inside the wall, in an old stone building, we wandered the streets and took photos. When we got back to the guest house, a young couple from Switzerland were at the door. They did not have a reservation but were looking for a room, and they had tried calling and messaging the host of our place but couldn't get ahold of her. We happened to have seen her at a nearby cafe, so we walked the Swiss couple back to the cafe, introduced them, and now have Swiss neighbors.

This is the quietest, prettiest little town. It reminds us a lot of the hill towns in Tuscany, which we love.

Ken and Cheryl on a gravel road somewhere in Spain.

This seemed like a good place to stop and degrease our chains.

Vineyards and olive orchards fill La Rioja, a wine-growing community in the Ebro Valley at the foothills of the Cantabrian Mountains.

Many of the churches we see in this area were built in the 16th-18th centuries. Their architecture is similar to that of Spanish mission churches in the American Southwest and Mexico--which were built during the same era.

Looking down from the wall around Laguardia.

A wrought iron balustrade decorated with grapes. We are in wine country, after all.

The tower at the center of town dates back to the 12th century.