Porto – Bordeaux // Stage 1
Porto – Geres
120km and 1.900m altitude
Well, Porto was a fucking blast. Axel, Ingo, Ben, Mo and Tritop already started last week to ride our tour bus from Hamburg to Porto. They stopped at CANYON in Koblenz to pick up some more tour bikes and then they enjoyed a perfect road trip with rides in France, Spain and Portugal. But that was just a very small taste of what will be ahead of us.
So we met with all the other 12 dudes in Porto yesterday, took our bikes for an easy spin in this awesome (!) city (get there if you can!!! No joke it’s unreal), got some nice food and then we went to bed way too late to get up today at 8am to start the first stage.
Only 120k and 2000m of altitude ahead of us. Sounded easy but… Axel and John had some minor crashes. We had 6 flats. It took us forever to finally roll and to be honest the first 100k kinda sucked. Well, the sun was shining, how bad can it be but Portugal just wasn’t too nice to us and treat us not with too much respect. It just gave us a hard time. Did anyone ever call Porto the Roubaix of Western Europe? It is! We rode at least 20k of cobbles today. And we’re not the biggest fans. Anyone ever was?
As always in cycling if you endure the pain and suffer enough you get rewarded with the best you can get. And we got it. A 15,8 kilometer ascent with 600m of altitude proved to be the first tough challenge of the tour. Everyony was pretty much riding his tempo (well except for Jo, Max, Ben, John, Fritz, Mo and Eike who made it a race (Ben won and took the KOM on this last mountain). We passed wild horses, some smaller waterfalls, a huge dam and just the most stunning nature.
Our campsite is just sitting here under some trees. It took us only minutes to set up the camp with our amazing Heimplanet tents. And everyone just seems overwhelmed that this is really starting again. Life is just better in Bib shorts.