Bike Ride Day 1 - Bilbao to Castro Urdiales

This first day of riding started in the middle of downtown Bilbao (a busy, urban, traffic-filled city) and ended in the beach resort of Castro Urdiales. Although I was on secondary roads, it was a Sunday and plenty of people were driving to and from the beach. I did end up on a couple of stretches that felt like major highways but with designated bike lanes along the side with 4 or 5 inch tall rubber bumpers to separate the main road from the bike lane. There were families and kids riding in the bike lane oblivious to the fact that semis going 60 miles an hour were buzzing by four feet away from them. I, however, noticed.








If someone ever hits me on this bike, they can’t claim that they didn’t see me because I blended into the background.









In the late 1800’s someone asked a famous architect to figure out a way to allow people (and horses and wagons, I guess) to get across the river at the outskirts of Bilbao. “Hmmm” thought the architect. “This is a novel problem that has never been attacked before. What could I design to allow people to get across a river?” Having no existing examples of this sort of thing to work from, and having just completed work on the Eiffel Tower, he decided to build a sideways Eiffel Tower across the river and suspend a car from it. “My creation shall be called . . . a transporter,” he announced proudly. So that’s what I traveled on today instead of a bridge. That’s how they do it in Spain.






I rode along water for a good part of the trip. This is a beach in the town of Pobeña. It's a very small town, but it seems like it’s built right on a huge estuary, so at low tide most of Pobeña looks like a beach.










Martha told me this ride would be pretty hilly, and of course she was right.















26 miles later, Castro Urdiales. The beach was nice but the harbor appealed to me more. And they serve beer on the harbor.