Hadrian's Wall | Camino de Santiago | Vietnam biking
A delayed post due to poor internet connectivity.
Everyone passes us! Everyone! Hola, we say. Buen Camino, they say. And off they go. Mostly this is because we are slow walkers, but we’d like to think that it is also because we pause to admire the fields of wildflowers, talk with the sheep, listen to bird song and cow bells, and look behind from where we’ve come. And take lots of photos!
Continue readingWe spent Saturday in a small city on the Bay of Biscay only 20 kilometers from the French border. It is a foodie town known for its Basque cuisine. It is a beach town with surfers in wetsuits carrying their boards to and from the waterfront. And as we came to learn, it is a town with an official name in two languages – Donostia (Basque) / San Sebastián (Spanish).
Continue readingThe spectacular views throughout our first day of Camino hiking were as beautiful as anything we’ve ever seen.
Continue readingA few weeks ago we read a New York Times piece about how to make the most of 36 hours in Madrid. We had less than 24 before catching our train to Irun. Staying in the center city and walking about turned out to be a great strategy.
Continue readingSharon spent New Years Day on a meditative retreat, so I took a meditative hike. My goal was to walk at least 15 miles with backpack in preparation for our upcoming trek on the Camino de Santiago in Spain. I ended up walking just over 16 miles on the Panther Point Trail, which skirts the east and south shores of Lake Hancock in western Polk County, Fla.
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There’s no place in Florida to adequately train for a bicycle ride up a long mountain trail like the spectacular climb to the Hai Van Pass in Vietnam. The ride takes you up 1,627 feet from nearly sea level, through a lush forest, to a windy overlook with photo-inspiring views of the South China Sea. The abandoned bunkers at the pass are sober reminders that French and then American soldiers fought there in the mid 20th Century.
We took a mostly downhill ride through the green beauty of the highlands outside of Dalat to southern Vietnam’s coast on Thursday (December 28), traveling from cool dry sunshine to the balmy humidity of the beach. What a glorious ride through rich forests and terraced hillsides covered with coffee trees. This is our second to last day of cycling, and all of us have that bittersweet sense that something special is nearing an end.
Our group spent two nights in Nha Trang, and by all accounts this was not our favorite stop. It’s a touristy beach town that caters to a huge number of Russian and Chinese travelers. Kind of surreal to see menus and shop signs in Russian and Chinese. But that kind of neon tourist venue is no fun in any language.
We encountered a wide variety of road conditions on our cycling trips between Nha Trang to Dalat, including several floods.
We departed the beach town of Quy Nhon at 7 a.m. Monday, riding a few minutes by bus to get us to our cycling start. The typhoon that hit the Philippines a few days ago is expected to make landfall in Vietnam on Tuesday. Although the eye of the storm is south of us, the weather looked foreboding. We were feeling pretty lucky that it was just clouds and a bit of wind as we got started.
Our 50 km morning ride took us through a river valley with mountains on either side. These are lush hillsides that very much remind us of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina.
Sometimes the road calls, and Sharon and Barry go. When we travel, this is where we’ll post our impressions via words, photos and videos. Thank you for joining us on our journeys.
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