Geoff Jones

I’m returning home from Rabat today 76 days after leaving Cambridge. Although I’ve returned back to the UK  a couple of times. Once from La Rochelle and once from Zaragoza both times with Ryanair. Total days in the saddle including the time when I was biking around Ibiza with Sally was 39 days and distance covered 2,218 miles (3549km) and ascended 92,287 feet (28,129 metres) or 2,300 feet per day 🙂

It’s been a very pleasurable ride and I really enjoyed Spain, apart from the dreaded section from Malaga to Sabinillas. Which interestingly I met at breakfast this morning a guy from Munich who is cycling from Malaga to Agadir and he agreed 🙂 I don’t envy his rde today in thunderstorms and the dreaded headwind! I wonder if he will hop on a bus again.

All the hotels have been OK with the most expensive at well over £100, of course at to be a  pub in the UK. The cheapest were a couple of places in Spain charging £21 per night. Overall I’ve spent  about £2,500 on accommodation for the 58 nights I’ve slept away so about £44 per night mainly with breakfasts.

The reason for returning earlier than anticipated is that the weather in Morocco is now atrocious, heavy rain & high head winds. So really it’s gone from a very pleasant ride to a bit of an ordeal.

Ryanair insist the bike is in a box, so the very friendly owner of Hotel Lutece in Rabat took me around to the local courier in the next street who gave me free run of their empty used cardboard boxes. I at to dismantle the bike a lot more than I normally do to get the bike in a box that would fit in Nick’s car back at Stansted.

I’ve blogged every moving day and the text of all the posts is in a pdf here or you can view them all in this link

The weather forecast  yesterday was so, so right 🙁 I awoke to very wet roads a very threatening sky and a wind that was going to be in my face all day long and a very long day at that.

The breakfast at the neighbouring cafe was excellent 2 fried eggs, bread, coffee, orange juice and a small pudding all for less than £1 🙂

I finally hit the road at 8.11 a whole hour after sunrise, must be getting old. The wind was awful, straight into my face especially with the frequent rain squalls 🙁 plus the road was quite dull essentially like the fens with long straight roads and abrupt bends .

The tiny poverty stricken roadside settlements were marked in Romanian style, loads of rubbish dumped on the village boundary. The kids run out and try a grab stuff of the bike, very annoying. One advantage of the rain was it kept the number of kids down.

I reached the area where they are constructing the new Kenitra – Tangier rail link. What a mess they are making of the road, it now comprises islands of tarmac separated by gravel/sand potholes. Totally a nightmare to bike on.

The rain became heavier and me more and more fed up with the traffic, I eventually reached Kenitra in the dark and raining heavy, not a good combination. I eventually found the station hoping to get a train to Rabat. Suddenly I heard shouting when I was wheeling the bike to the info boards. A very brusque guard made it clear that bikes are not allowed in stations and certainly not on the trains 🙁 He escorted me to the parcels office outside (identical to the Red Star at Cambridge Station of old). They said my bike would go overnight to Rabat. I said no way and left.

I found an equally miserable coffee place to rethink. Booking.com hotels were all sold out 🙂 so I checked maps.me to find there was a  Hotel Europa. I zoomed around arriving like the proverbial drowned rat. They had a room on the fourth floor as long as I didn’t mind the bar music! after 80 miles biking in those conditions they could have had an orchestra playing and I would have slept, especially after lugging the bike all the way up the staircase.

Strava says I did 80.1 miles and 1,473 feet of climbing at 9.4mph probably one of my toughest days ever,

Some pics are on dropbox here

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