April 5: Santa Magdelena

To my surprise I actually slept a bit (just as I had slept a bit on the plane as well) and woke up only at 4:30am. By 5:30am, Boen was up and bouncing, so rather than have him annoy everyone else I took him downstairs to the lobby and asked if we could start assembling the bikes. The night receptionist felt sorry for me and told me that I could assemble the bikes indoors as it was cold, but that if anyone started trying to use the lobby, I had to give them room. I happily assented.

First to come together was Xiaoqin’s bike, because that was where all the tools were—her bike was by far the lightest, so her bike box had the capacity to store tools, an extra chain, and lubricant. After that, I assembled my bike, followed by Bowen’s, and then Boen’s which was the easiest—since it was too heavy to put into a Trico hard case without exceeding the 23kg weight limit, we opted to use the bike box in the garage left from when we had purchased the Lynskey GR300. Boen’s bike was so small that all we had to do was to remove the pedals, remove the handlebars from the stem, and the rear derailleur, and the front wheel, and everything fit into the box. We did not even have to lower the seatpost or remove it from the frame!

By the time I finished, the breakfast room was open. We parked the bikes at the bike shop and put the empty boxes back into the luggage storage area and ate a breakfast. After all that, a change to bike clothing and we were ready to ride! All this time Arturo and Mark had been texting us about their progress, but they in fact only got to the hotel just as we departed on our ride.

I’d never been in this part of Mallorca before, and had picked out a gentle ride with two out and back climbs. Bowen wanted to skip them but had refused to load the route onto his bike computer, so he ended up doing the first (and prettiest) out and back climb to the start of the Victoriax hike parking lot. The day was gorgeous and the mediterranean looked as blue and beautiful as the Pacific Ocean does in California. Once back in the town of Bonaire, the route took us on what I consider classical Spanish roads—narrow single track roads lined with stone walls with next to no traffic and occasional views of beautiful flower fields. The day was warm but not too hot and the occasional sea-breeze felt refreshing.

Sadly enough, we had to ride through Playa du Muro, the super-touristy resort strip. However, the silver lightning was that this gave Bowen a chance to buy new sunglasses for his ride. We then exited on a main road. Since the prevailing wind was from the West, this meant we were hitting a headwind. The going was tough since the wind was light. The best feature of Mallorca is that there are cyclists everywhere—every day is  like a century ride. No matter where you look and which direction you’re riding, there’s a paceline of cyclists going this way and that.

At one point a group of women passed us and we jumped on the paceline, being disappointed when a couple of kilometers down the road they veered off into another direction. Bowen had fallen off the pace, however, as we skirted around Sa Pablo and we stopped often to let him catch up.

We eventually made it to Santa Magdalena, the start of the second out and back climb. The scenery wasn’t uninspiring, but Xiaoqin decided that since we were there anyway we might as well climb it. Bowen, Boen, Stephan, and Otto waited while we did the 30 minute 3km, 200m climb. It was a very pleasant climb, gentle in grade like in most of Mallorca.

When we got to the top I realized we should have made everyone do the climb as there was a very highly rated cantina on top! Nothing to do but to descend and then find another restaurant. It was already 2:30pm, so the other restaurant we found was already fully booked and refused to seat us! Instead, we found a supermarket and had a supermarket lunch before starting to ride back.

This time, we had a tailwind instead of a headwind and it was very pleasant going. We’d gotten a text from Mark and Arturo that they had abandoned the ride past Playa du Mura, since the headwind had strengthened. Our ride back along a designated bike route was nice, and at one point when the route deviated from the GPS track I had laid down ages ago we decided to just use the bike route. In fact, I turned off route following and used my Edge’s 840 instead, which gave us a short cut to our hotel.

Arriving back at the hotel at 4:30pm, Boen and I took a quick dip into the unheated swimming pool and we decided we had better options than being cold in a hotel pool for the rest of the trip.

Over dinner, we marveled at how the food was better than Miralago’s. Going back to the hotel room, we went to bed early hoping that the jet lag would be kind to us again.