Intro

This was something that I wanted to do long before the trip that started this blog, but I never really found the time and then the big trip took up all my time in planning and then riding. Back from it, a year went by with lots of daily riding and the odd weekend trip, but there was not long trip in sight. I had always assumed that the bike might not last much longer after such a demanding experience, and that replacing it would mean saving up, so there were no big trips planned for the 2014 summer.

However come the summer the bike was well over 60,000 miles and still working like a dream, and seeing that I had a week to myself before my girlfriend took her holidays and we went for a longer trip together (more on that later), I decide to blow the dust off this ride.

My original idea had been to ride west along the southern side of the Catalan Pyrenees (mostly on the N-260) up to La Vall d’Aran and then back east on the French side, which would only have taken a long weekend or four days, but now I wanted something longer and with more interesting routes, so I got a set of three maps from Michelin Zoom series which covered the whole of the mountain range in good detail and set about planning a route that would take me across as many mountain passes as possible.