Here follows the chronicle of a voyage across the Pyrenees by bicycle, from Barcelona to Bordeaux, and then by train to Paris. The trip was undertaken by five of us in June of , and stretched over ten days and about miles of cycling.
The notes for this journal were kept by way of a mini-cassette recorder, on which I recorded thoughts and observations, passing sounds, songs and even jokes, while on my bicycle, on trains and planes, and even under the ground in caves.
Since I had driven down from Paris a few days earlier, I was already waiting outside the Gran Via hotel in Barcelona on the morning of June 20th, a Saturday. It had rained the night before, but the sky had cleared through the morning, leaving the day clear and sun-washed. The boulevard in front of the hotel is wide, with the main thoroughfare separated from outer lanes by raised islands of paving stones and park benches, the sunlight dappling them through the leaves of the plane trees.
Then I went across the street to buy an International Herald Tribune to do he crossword puzzle. There on the front page was a story about a bomb going off here in Barcelona yesterday, killing 15 people and injuring This made me a little nervous at each loud noise in the street, and it happened to be a day when people were shooting off fireworks all over the place- big ones too!
Just as I was beginning to worry about them a little, my fellow-travelers came pedaling the wrong way up the street. I had first met Bob, Rosie and their neighbor Gay on a cycling trip in China a couple of years ago, and we had toured together with Henry and Mimi and Bill on the. Since then I had become a long-distance member of their cycling club, the Western Jersey Wheelmen.
