Tuixent to Organya

 

Pyrenees

September 13, 2024 

Tuixent to Organya

The planned route

 

After our shortish day into Tuixent, I suggested we could try a blue/remote section. It would be at the beginning of the day, so we should have plenty of time and wouldn't be racing against the dark monster to get to a hotel at the end of the day. It had certainly worked out well for us on the previous day to not have a fixed destination. I like being able to pick a nice looking village or hotel, but there is always the chance that everything could be booked, so sometimes we plan ahead, and other times we do things on the fly. For this day, we decided to throw caution to the wind in multiple ways. 

September is considered off-season, so despite Tuixent being a charming village, there was nothing open aside from the bar/auberge where we stayed. Roger, our host, made egg sandwiches for us to carry for lunch. Our friends from the evening before had mentioned an herb shop in Ossera, where we could get a hot or cold drink. But there wouldn't be much else in the way of food or drink on our proposed route. 

It was another absolutely gorgeous day. We started with a big paved climb, and somehow managed to miss the turn onto gravel, so we climbed all the way up to the col and then backtracked back down a kilometer or so to our turn!

Today was the test for me to determine whether we should keep on the original plan. The second half of the route had lots of  the so-called remote sections, with very few alternatives. Up to this point, we'd had plenty of options. But once on the northern leg into Andorra, we'd be committed or face backtracking. This was John's vacation too, and I know he loves this stuff and would have thoroughly enjoyed the whole route. But as much as he loves stopping for photos, he was going to have lots more time to take photos than even he would like if I found myself on foot. So here we go...

We started to wonder if we'd misread the name of the region and it was actually CATTLE-lonia. We have a friend in Massachusetts who obsessively takes photos of cows on all her rides, so we thought of her often on this trip. How many memory cards would she fill if riding here?

Oops, we discovered our missed turn and got to backtrack. It was an easy turn to miss, a tiny gravel road that went straight up! We arrived at the next col pretty quickly and I foolishly took it as a good sign!

Of course I should have learned by this point that there is always plenty of climbing after the cols here. It was also a bit rugged, with lots of big and small loose rocks. Having run out of things to photograph while waiting for me to inch my way up, John ran back down and pushed my bike up one of the rougher bits. It alternated between sections I was comfortable riding and others that I crawled along at a snails pace due to steepness or gnarliness, both up and down! To my credit, I did ride most of it, but if this was typical conditions of the so-called remote sections, I feared we might not finish the route before our flight home! There was no way I could do 100km a day in conditions like this. I really wished for fatter tires, but even if I had them, we'd need a lot more daylight to ride that kind of distance every day.

John theorized some of the gravel was fresh due to some amount of maintenance on the roads and it might not all be like this. We did see large piles that suggested as much. Some of the bigger rocks had likely fallen from above. But given what we'd seen up to this point, I decided if we made it out of this section, we'd have to go to plan B.

It was gorgeous here! But so were the places we could get to on quiet paved roads. And there was still plenty of climbing to be done.

We made it to Ossera, where we had an elderflower infusion drink. We also bought some herbs to make sore leg tea later and found some chocolate as well. I mapped out our alternate route and we climbed up to a lovely ridge and then had one of our best hairpin descents of the trip, going into Organya.

We found a campground in Organya with bungalows. Lots of campgrounds in this region had these types of accommodation, complete with a kitchen. We took the lazy option of eating at the restaurant, but it's great to have this option. Now to map out our alternate route home.