Ride 10/10/2021 Portugal Day 1

Well I can’t say how much I’m glad to be back in the saddle abroad it’s been 2 years since I’ve manged to ride abroad and I’ve sorely missed it. Today was the first day in Portugal and what a lovely place to be, glorious sunshine and stunning scenery. I’ll be riding the entire length of the country from north to south, so we start in the hillier part of the country before we head into the southern flatter part of the country. Today we rode 65 miles over some lumpy sections but nothing too hard, roughly 5% climbs most of the time getting up to around 2500 feet before dropping down to about 300 feet for our lunch stop. The food was good nothing too fancy, pasta and some salad, but the right stuff for cycling with and lots of coffee After lunch we had to climb back up to 1500 feet to get to tonight’s hotel stop but I enjoyed this as most of the climbs today were smallish In fact I was enjoying the climb so much I shot past the hotel all together and didn’t realise until I came to a junction and wondered why the route map had stopped With an avg speed of 15 mph I wasn’t hammering it which meant that all in all today was a good ride and I’m looking forwards to tomorrows longer ride.