Day 1 Ride to Plasenzuela

Well good morning afternoon evening from where ever you are, today is the start of our 5 day Portugal/Spain road trip and it was meant to get started at around 9:30am this morning BUT due to circumstances almost beyond control it was delayed until 11:30am this is because Derek was expecting to receive Disk pads for his bike a few day ago as his own are almost shot, but unknown to all of us Yesterday was a holiday and the package got delayed so Derek was literally sat outside a Bike shop this morning at 10am hoping they would first be open and second and more importantly have the front disk pads for his bike. It took a while but eventually I got the message that he had the pads and would be round in a few minutes. Now so you understand why myself and Derek and on our own our friend has just had a road trip with his friends in Northern Spain and will be meeting us in a town that would involve us travelling similar distance to meet to start the trip tomorrow all together. The town is Plasenzuela and its is about 430kms for us all to travel today to meet there. Now as myself and Derek left a little later than hoped, we jumped on our bikes and headed North towards Monsaraz which would be our first main stop for lunch it would take us 2.5 hours to get there and the route up was great not the usual twisties we like but a means to a end as we would be riding for around 5-6 hours each today.
We arrived at about 2pm and found a nice restaurant and had some lunch and a well deserved cold drink, what actually should have happened is, we should have walked around the town first to have a look and then go into the air conditioned restaurant for lunch but NO we did it the other way round, its was 37C and the walk around town almost killed us, the town is beautiful though and it was the first time for Derek so I think it was worth the suffering, after the walk we had to sit on our bikes that had been in the sun for a hour and roast our nuts off. Once we got moving it started to feel better but we were struggling as the temps were rising gradually, at one point Derek who had a audio recorder stuck to the side of his helmet shouted out that is had come off, now the heat had melted a scotch 3M pad thankfully he caught it and we packed it away for another day. The roads up into Spain changed a little at first and then quite drastically, in places it was like riding through Canadas plains, so baron and almost all the life burnt out of it. We had 2.5 hours to go and it was beginning to effect us, we had to stop to rehydrate about 40 minutes out of Plasenzuela, we stopped at a gas station and texted Cliff who told us he was at the hotel and about to cool off in the pool,  NOT what we wanted to hear as we were dripping with sweat and ready for a cold beer. We jumped back on the bikes and pushed on towards the hotel, the last 30 minutes was brutal it got to 39C its amazing what 2C can do to a body we were physically exhausted by the time we pulled up next to the hotel, we also forgot about the 1 hour difference so we got there at about 6:30pm. Cliff was there waiting and the lady that checked us into the hotel was lovely, one of the first things she did was get us both a cold beer. We got got into our rooms peeled off the drenched clothes and showered and went into town. We found a very local pub in the town square and ordered 3 very cold beers they didnt take too long to disappear, we stayed there for about 4 rounds and then decided to walk down to a sports bar we had seen online for food, when we got there a really rude guy happily told us they had no food and we thought well fuck you we will go back to the hotel, we got back almost as the owner was about to leave and she said they didnt do food but the place we went to first did basic food, so we went back and had a few more beers and a round of cheese burgers, Cliff found it necessary to have another one but who cars gutsy fucker.
We caught up on Cliffs route down to us and listened to his tales of the last few days with his friends on his trip and hoped we could have a similar experience. We decided at about 10:45pm it was time to hit the sack and agreed to meet at 8am in the morning for breakfast and then start our even bigger push down to Ronda tomorrow.
A great but long day with the heat being the only real concern, but we hear that southern Spain is hotter so I guess we have some more sweaty days ahead.

I would just like to say that today we had a lot of issues with the tech due to heat problems, the cameras would switch themselves off which is why there was no ride in video into Monsaraz and also other points en-route, plus Dereks audio recorder became unstuck from his helmet again due to the heat and we had to put that away, so I am guessing that tomorrow might not be any different, so sorry for the sudden jumps in the videos its because its too dam hot.