I’m in my tent. It’s freaking small, like… so small I have to curl down my toes so they don’t touch against the end of the tent. But it’s awesome, because I can hear the sounds of the ocean right next to me. I’m at this massively huge beach (40 kilometers long) about half an hour away from Bayona, which was supposed to be our next stop. Alejandro is still with me (his gf comes to pick him up tomorrow, sad day for me), but he’s sleeping outside on the sand right next to my tent, cause he’s my slave and that’s how I roll.
Yesterday was awesome. As I wrote in my previous post, we slept at an empty crack house with the coolest views of the mountains ever. I had never had so much fun hammering nails against the walls to make hangers and moving shit around to build our one-night home. The story, however, really turned sideways overnight, to an extent that borders the surreal… Let me explain. Turns out, the crack house was empty that day because they had called the cops the previous night, as around 60 people had been illegally partying all over the building, consuming drugs, having sex (on the mattress we were sleeping in) and an 18 year old kid had thrown a fireball against one of the neighboring houses, causing serious damage to the woman’s living room. The cops showed up but the party was so out of control that they had to call in a dozen extra police officers to calm things down, and ended detaining 28 people. The rest ran away through the forest. Lucky us that we decided to sleep in that building precisely the day after that huge mess had happened. Apparently one of the neighbors saw the light coming from my headlamp at around 2 am when I woke up to pee, and called the cops. By the time I was falling back asleep we were surrounded by blinding lights. They laid us flat on the ground, checked through all our stuff and asked us questions for what seemed like an eternity. We finally convinced them that we had nothing to do with what had happened during the previous night, but they kept insisting we couldn’t sleep the rest of the night there, and took us to sleep at the police station, which was in the next town. I never thought the beds in jail were so comfy! They even gave us some extra pillows hahaha My god, I still can’t believe this happened. Okay so maybe it didn’t :b I’m sorry I just felt really creative hehe.
The truth is, we slept quite well that night, had a huge breakfast the next morning and took off with our bikes to Hendaya. We are awesome at cycling, or so it seems, because it took us just a few hours to get there and we had time to buy food, explore the area, cycle a bit more until we reached a small town in France (NOUS SOMME A LA FRANCE!!) called Saint Joan de Croix, settle down in the middle of a small beach and go for an amazing swim. Reaching the ocean is awesome. There is something exhilarating about cycling relentlessly through mountains and valleys awaiting the moment when they will give way to an infinity of blue.
For you this may just be a new paragraph, but for me it’s been an entire day since I wrote the previous sentence. I fell asleep last night and haven’t been able to write until now, 60km up north. I guess I should continue from where I left off, let me see…Ok yes, yesterday was a beach day! I got so tanned I look golden :D. First we had an early morning swim at the beach where we slept (in Joan de Croix). Then we cycled up and down very steep hills, came across this type of scenery…
And kept going until we reached Biarritz, a surfer town where we went for another swim, because there was no saying no to this…
I havent been mentioning food but we eat aaaaall the time. I always have a huge piece of bread right behind my seat and munch on it ever now and then, and we also stop and eat some of the homemade energy bars I made. They were supposed to be for an emergency in case I am dying in the woods, and we already ate 1 out of four bags. Oh well.
After that we kept going and reached Bayona, which is a much bigger city. Here I got excited thinking we would find a place to upload all this word porn I’m creating, but still no freakin free wifi anywhere. The thing is, there comes a point during the day when we need to start hunting for supermarket food and looking for a place to sleep. I must say that it’s very exciting to not know where you will sleep the following night, and even more exciting to think that that place can be anything, from a park to an old closed-down building. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let me go back to food. So it was food time and we were hungry. The problem is, we were also lost. We tried reaching a carrefour but got so lost that Alejandro started losing it and swearing at all the pigeons like an insane person. He’s funny. In the end Alejandro had to turn on his roaming service and we used Oh Lord the Savior Google Maps Amen to find the closest Carrefour, which still took us about 45 minutes to reach. Then, visual foodgasms. Multiple ones. I’ll skip this part.
Fully loaded on nutrients we went looking for a new home for the night, and happened to come across what looked to be another awesome place to sleep… An old and abandoned radiology hospital! The place looked insane, it was all locked down but you could see through a hole that it was all destroyed inside, exactly like the type of scenery you would find in a zombie movie. We couldn’t wait to find a way in and spend the best and worst night of our lives in there. Eventually we found a way in but the problem of the bikes remained, so I went exploring behind the building to see if I could find a way to get the bikes in with us. I surrounded the building and found an open window and right beneath it a perfect spot to leave the bikes. Problem is, the window was on the second floor. So I climbed on to the roof parkour mode and peeked in. All good. Then, I turn my head to the side… Slowly… And I see it. Looking into me, nakedizing my soul, raping me from the inside… A huge, shiny and very threatening… SECURITY CAMERA. Right when we crossed ‘eyes’, the freakin loudest alarm started blasting in and outside of the building. So I got off the roof as fast as I could, walked along the road as normally as I could, got to Alejandro, who was laughing his ass off because he knew it was my fault, grabbed the bikes and ran. No problemo. How exciting! xD
So without a plan to sleep, we cycled until we reached the train railroads, which we had seen before, and decided we could camp by them. 10 minutes later we were on our bikes headed as far away from that place as possible, as it was infested with spiders and other nasty critters, and Alejandro, who does not have a tent and sleeps out in the open, was not willing to have the things crawl in his nose and ears.
We decided we would cycle a bit further up until we reached a really long beach that looked like a decent place to sleep. And indeed, it was…
Best decision ever. We saw the most beautiful sunset ever while eating the best tasting beans with spaguetti (don’t judge, when you’re this hungry you’ll eat boiled stones if they let you haha). The small things in life (which are also usually free as well) are the best.
And now, I am finally back to where I started, with me inside the tent in the beach and Alejandro sleeping right beside me, but outside of it. Never slept better in my life :).