Spanish tour 2011

[barnesy]

I have asked on here before about doing a Spanish cycle tour in 2011, however my plans have changed slightly. A non cycling friend wants to join in and i know he would be up to it. We would be cycling between 50 and 60 miles a day and camping, the only thing is hes a formula one fan so we want to take in the Spanish Grad Prix on the 22nd of May.

The grand prix takes place just outside of Barcelona so we could fly to somewhere in Spain and spend a week cycling to Barcelona to fly home or what seems more likely, to fly to barcelona on the friday, see the F1 and then cycle for a week or so to somewhere where we can fly home.

Because of where Barcelona is situated we have an endless number of routes we could take, can anybody make any suggestions?

We could work our way upwards around the coast into France and Nice

We could go downwards roughly following the coast and fly home from Malaga

We could cycle inwards towards Madrid

We could cycle up towards pamplona then over the Pyrenees into France and home from Bordeaux

Id like a few mountains and some nice scenery, the weather should be good and ideally id like traffic/tourist free routes.

Up into the Pyrenees either via Gerona or Pamplona could be good?

If anybody is familiar with any of these routes or can suggest anything else then please let me know?

 

[insurin]

I cycled last year Barcelona to Nice and a month or 2 later Barcelona to Alicante which consisted of getting hammered (drinking) in Benidorm, rolling in at 6am and setting off at 9am in the heat to get to the airport. Forget pau, alpe d huez cols, you want to try cycling with no sleep totally mullered and in the benidorm heat.

Barcelona to Nice was my best ever tour (maybe as it was my first). The Barcelona to Alicante was a bit of a drag, headwinds for the most part and we rode into a monster of a storm approaching gandia? Also we did veer 30 miles the wrong way out of Valencia going east instead of south.

edit above. I meant to say we rode west instead of south. East would have sent us in the sea. What a fool. Now you can see how easy it is for me to get lost.