Today we exhausted ourselves with a 115km ride – about 30km longer than planned due to having to find accommodation. However we have truly put the impact of Barcelona traffic behind us. Luckily the weather was overcast the whole day.

The first part of our ride had heavy traffic – through suburb type towns; hilly; to Sentmenant where we had a coffee.

The next part of the ride was the best, through hilly wooded areas with less traffic to Terrassa, a pretty city. Then onto Manressa, passing through several tunnels. I thought we may find accommodation here, but it was an awful place – very busy, ugly apartments, smelly, couldn’t find the tourist info. So we decided we would press on about 10km to a smaller town called Rajadell. According to the map there is a tourist info office here too – so we felt there would be accommodation.

The road to the town was busy, with lots of roadworks. When we got there we found out that the tourist info is closed on Mondays and the hotel advertised is also evidently not in existence anymore. So instead of going backwards we went onto Calaf – first on the busy road, however we were directed onto a side road by some officials (part of the building works?) – this road was much better – basically a service road to the highway.

We got to Calif at around 6pm (having started at about 8.30am) and quickly found a hotel – lovely place with a large room and bathroom with a bath. Totally exhausted! Jenny refused to leave and Kris had to go and fetch some food.

Highlights – views of the mountains sticking up out of the ground with long columns at the top like pre-historic teeth.