Mrs Spekkie out on a training ride between Ainsa and Barbastro. Beautiful Clear Skies, Good Roads and Strong Legs!

[video]https://youtu.be/Hpknd9EehO8[/video]

“The fate is cast, we have been tasked with defeating Mordor on 23 September – We need everyone’s help, get your bike ready and come. And if we don’t win, we might as well have a good time”

Big article about the race in this month’s “bikes World” (Spanish MTB mag). Looks good.

Thanks for the updates. I had a haircut in barbastro when cycling barcelona to pamplona about 20 years ago, my hair was so minging after a few days cycling in the heat i had a numero uno…

I would love to do the trip again but now have villa lets till oct, maybe after when its cooled off. The vuelta passed by here yesterday, i love it.

I would love to do the trip again but now have villa lets till oct, maybe after when its cooled off. The vuelta passed by here yesterday, i love it.

Where’s your villa, poolman? Just bought a place in Torrevieja, the Vuelta passed by there too yesterday.

The race is a big deal round here Mogrim 🙂

Here in Spain when you commission an architect to prepare a complete “Project” for you, he supplies you with two things:

Firstly a complete set of drawings. Drawings of how the property looks now and how it will look like when it’s finished. Detailed schematics of the heating, electrical and plumbing layouts and detailed drawings of how various parts of the project – the roof, walls, floors etc, should be constructed.

Secondly he gives you a “Project Book”. This is a 100 plus page book that he puts together which details all the rules and regulations pertaining to how the building work should be carried out on your specific build, which standards of materials must be used, etc etc.

The Project Book also contains “The Budget”. This is a step by step list of every single job that needs to be carried out in the process of turning our agricultural barn into a house & home (or in our case, a home and a B&B!). It starts with the removal of the existing barn roofing, finishes with the final coat of varnish on the staircase handrails and includes every single activity in between. Each item has a “cost” next to it – the price of which comes from the official “Big Book of Pricing for Builders”. The Builders themselves see this “Budget” (and no doubt have a copy off the Big Book) and when they quote you for a job, they quote, “mas or minus”, in line with the architects recommended prices.

This means that for every job that needs to be done throughout the project, we know how much the architect says it should cost to do and how much the Builder wants to do it.

We will use this comparison to work out exactly how much the builder is going to charge us for each separate job that we ask him to do and we will use it to work out how much we are saving by doing certain jobs ourselves.

The “Intersport” sports shop in Ainsa has a bike workshop and Angel stocks a wide range of replacement Rear Mech Hangers there.

As with any MTB cycling holiday though, I’d advise you keep one of your own spare in your kit just in case … . I was in the shop chatting to Angel yesterday when a lad brought his bike in with a broken hanger and his own replacement part. He’d stacked on his first ride on the first day of a two week holiday!

Angel fitted it for him and fixed his bent brake lever and he was back on the trails by the afternoon 🙂

I’ve spent this weekend riding Zona Zero with a group of guys from Denmark!

About 6 weeks ago a chap asked to join my FB page “MTB Ainsa!”

https://www.facebook…18185251605562/

He said he was flying down from Denmark with some friends to ride the Zona Zero trails and was reading up all he could about the area on-line. I gave him some help & info regarding bike hire shops etc because they were not all bring their own bikes and then when they got here on Friday Mrs Spekkie and I met them for a beer up in the Old Town Plaza. I offered to show them some of my favorite trails and so we all spent two days exploring together.

A really nice bunch of guys, into XC with “techy” descents, similar level of fitness and bike skill to me and not adverse to climbing – although Denmark is very very flat apparently, so it was hard work for them 🙂

This is exactly the sort of thing we are going to try and do for people when our B&B is open. Help them plan before they get here and then feed them, look after them and help them find their way around once they are here.

On Saturdays ride we ended up coming though our village, Guaso, and we stopped in at the farmhouse for a coffee with Mrs Spekkie and Rosa – who was very happy to have 5 “Guapo Hombres” (good looking young guys) in her kitchen while Ramon was out! I did the translating while they took photos of Rosa and her kitchen before we carried on with our ride. We stopped and had a look at our “house to be” on our way past and they loved it and the views. They are sure it will be fantastic once it’s all done and they want to come back next year and stay with us – let’s hope we have somewhere for them by then!

They enjoyed the riding, I enjoyed the English speaking company and Rosa enjoyed having visitors. It was a nice, though fairly tough, weekend.

Bent, Pauli, Jakob, Jan and Soren . . .

Do you have an EU recognised guiding qualification and the necessary insurance, Spekkie? If not, even if you don’t get grassed up by the qualified guides in the area, a serious accident would result in you losing the shirt off your back. Our club was guided by a French guide with all of his paperwork up to date.

Edukator – Yes I’m aware of the dangers of guiding someone without qualifications or insurance. It’s not something we would want to get involved in.

This weekend was riding with friends. My involvement with “Guests” would stop at showing them “on paper” where to ride and how to get there and then leaving them to it.

The trails are so well signposted here that you don’t need a guide to show you the way, but it’s helpful to have someone to tell you which bits to do, to get the most out of your limited time here.

We are actually looking at the necessary qualifications because I’d quite like to get into the “mountain rescue” side of things too and they are related.

This weekend was riding with friends. My involvement with “Guests” would stop at showing them “on paper” where to ride and how to get there and then leaving them to it.

Be careful with this – you might still be liable as a ride “organiser”, even if you’re not actually guiding.

Edit: there’s an article here – your responsability would be limited, although it would up to a judge to determine by how much. If you sent a clearly inexperienced group on a dangerous trail, for example, you could certainly face legal problems.

Good point mogrim. I’ll keep that in mind.

This weekend was great because the guys were all very similar in fitness and tech ability to me. The only person to come off was . . . me.

To be honest, sending any group of inexperienced riders to ride anywhere in Zona-Zero is only going to end in tears. Either they will stack or they will come back knackered after having had a miserable few hours pushing their bikes up and down “un-rideable” climbs. I wouldn’t promote Ainsa MTB to anyone who can’t already ride. This is not the place to “learn riding”.

For the non-riders, Ainsa and the surrounding areas have many many other things to offer. Amazing Geology, beautiful scenery, inhabited and uninhabited ancient villages, a wide variety of bird life – particularly birds of prey, hill walking, river swimming and fishing, tons of exploring . . . .

Some Pictures of our Project as it is now and as it will be once it’s finished.

The first pic is of the back of the property with the sloping back garden – This side of the house faces North and North East – towards the Pyrenees. We have lovely views from here so the sloping back garden will be terraced into flat sitting areas for meals and sun bathing. It gets sun first thing in the morning but is nice and shady later in the day.

Second pic is the front of the property, which faces South & South West. Shaded in the morning (good for cleaning bikes in the cool!) but gets the afternoon sun later on. There will be some parking and a front garden with a little terrace here. Also our firewood stack will be up here.

Last pic is of the west side of the property. The Kitchen door will drop down a meter or so and the tower will be raised up just over a meter to allow for three floors. Mrs Spekkie wants herbs growing here next to the back door for when she’s cooking

🙂

Get stuck in !

The trails are so well signposted here that you don’t need a guide to show you the way

Even our guide who had ridden the area before got lost. 😛

We are trying to keep track of the many Fiestas and Carnivals that happen locally over here through the summer so that if visitors ask us if there is anything on, we can tell them.

It involves drinking Beer & Wine, eating lots of food and watching Carnivals . . . it’s a tough job, but someone has to do it!

Last Monday was the Barbastro Fiesta & Carnival. It’s 45km away and we have friends who live there so we were invited to visit for the day 🙂

[video]https://youtu.be/bvLOHBCWFTs[/video]
[video]https://youtu.be/jpLhERAFmT4[/video]
[video]https://youtu.be/ICuko_Kiviw[/video]

Every evening I feed the moms with Ramon the Friendly Farmer and then we let the babies run around in the open-sided barn for a bit while I fill the water troughs. Today I took a little video . . .

[video]https://youtu.be/hfXWvP6i1II[/video]

We’ve had a hectic last couple of weeks. It’s been a combination of fun times, stressy times and plain old hard work. It takes it’s toll on you, emotionally and physically, but it also motivates you to “get on” and make plans to change the bits you’re not happy with . . .

The next couple of posts will cover everything that’s happened in the last fortnight . . . .

🙂

You have my attention, and maybe a family holiday one year soon…

We spent the weekend in Zumaia area with the MTB club, about 3000e was spent between three albergés by 30. We’re planning a trip to Ainsa some time, renting mobile homes on the campsite as the last gîte near Ainsa was nothing special. The best albergé near Zumaia had six double rooms, 20e50 per person per night with breakfast, bike washing, washing machine, safe storage, an excellent restaurant, showers available after check out on sunday.

Sounds good – that is a nice part of the coast too.

Who doesn’t like a Party!?

“Fiesta” is Spanish for Party and here where we are we have two different types of Fiesta.

The most frequent kind is the Religious Fiesta, which is held at a Hermitage – a small Chapel named after a Saint and often found on remote hilltops or tucked away in among farm buildings. Following the Mass there is always plenty of nice wine and bread to eat or, if the hermitage is on a remote hilltop – we take a picnic 🙂

Years ago remote hermitages were maintained by the Hermits that lived in them. Nowadays the village or the family on who’s land the Hermitage lies tend to look after them. Guaso has 6 of these Hermitage Chapels and therefore 6 of these Fiestas a year, including two in August and one in September – so we’ve been to three in recent weeks!

The second type of Fiesta is the sort of thing we’re more familiar with. A “town” Fietsa starts in the afternoon with a Carnival and then has a Fun Fair, Beer stalls, Traditional Dancing, Fireworks etc etc and involves drinking and dancing in the streets. In the evening there are live bands on stages in the town Plaza and more drinking and eating.

We’ve also been to two of these in recent weeks!

For the moment we are all partied out . . . .

This Saturday is the Zona Zero race – “La Batalla Del Inframundo” (The Battle of the Underworld) in Ainsa, Spain.

This video shows you the views from one of the highest points of the race followed by one of the descents. No sure who the rider is but he’s having fun!

I really am happy to be living in such a beautiful place!

[video]https://youtu.be/ayym0LNvIkc[/video]

Un adelanto de lo que deparará la Batalla del Inframundo este sábado. ¡No os lo perdáis! Gracias a Martín Campoy y Osole Visual

An advance of what the battle of the underworld will hold this Saturday. Don’t miss it! Thanks to Martín Campoy and Osole Visual

Mrs Spekkie Road Riding between Ainsa and Campo.

A beautiful day, little traffic and fantastic scenery . . . .

[video]https://youtu.be/pVWGCfN6DFg[/video]

Who doesn’t love to buy a new car!?

When I first drove down to Spain from the UK with an old Mazda 626 full of our belongings, the plan was for the car to last 6 months. After that, if you plan on living here you have to either get yourself a Spanish car or have your UK car registered in Spain – Spanish number plates, Spanish Road Tax etc etc.

Registering a foreign car is a bit pricey – maybe to encourage you to buy a local car? And in order to get our car through the Spanish version of the Road Worthy / MOT test, we would also need to replace the headlights with ones designed for driving on the Right Hand side of the road instead of the left. The whole exercise wasn’t really viable with such an old car so we started looking for a second-hand Spanish car . . . .

The second-hand market for cars here is not good. Cars tend to be expensive. Because so few new cars were sold during the Spanish Crisis that started in 2008, there is a “hole” in the second-hand car market.

We scoured the local car sales places (of which there are not many) and the internet in an attempt to find a suitable car but, as our building planning application dragged on and on the task of finding a car got put on the back burner . . .

During the summer months our foreign car was hidden among many other foreign cars here on holiday, but as the season headed towards a close we decided we really needed to get ourselves a cheap & cheerful car – that would be legal on the roads here.

Eventually Mrs Spekkie found a car that seemed suitable and, after some trips to the nearby town of Huesca and lots of question, we settled on a Hyundai Santa Fe.

It’s quite old and has a fair few miles on the clock but it was affordable, came with new tyres and a new battery, it’s clean and tidy and it has four wheel drive – which is essential if you live in the mountains and like to venture up paths designed for tractors!

The size is taking a bit of getting used to, but the steering wheel is on the correct side and we had a tow bar fitted so that we can use our bike rack and the trailer we bought over from our South Africa.

One day it would be nice to look for cars online and not have to always select the “Lowest Price First” option, but maybe that will come in time. Meanwhile, we are very happy.

We have finally started some work on our property!

A few weeks ago we invited a young English couple that we met at “Learn Spanish” class in town to come and see our “Viking Hut” before going out for Pizza & Beer.

They loved our place and, whilst showing them around, I explained to Ben that although we knew we couldn’t start work on the actually “building” without enlisting the help of a builder, I would have been happy to start working on the sloping back garden – if it weren’t for the fact that in every article I read about terracing & landscaping a sloping garden, “Step One” was to build a suitable retaining wall!

The existing very dodgy 1m high wall needed to be replaced by a good strong 3.5m high stone wall (leaning back at 15 degrees). Now, this isn’t something to rush into . . . You stand a chance of the existing garden “slipping” when the old wall is removed if you’re not careful and then I’d be in a world of mud!

To cut a long story short, Ben told me to stop being such a baby and that he’d help us get started if I got the materials ready 🙂

So, here we go . . . .

I spoke to Angel from Zona Zero this week and he told me that last Saturdays “La Batalla Del Inframundo” was a huge success!

I couldn’t ride but we did pop in to the registration on Friday evening up at the Ainsa Castle and it looked great. The race was well organised and well subscribed. I helped clear some of the route earlier in the year. I’m glad it went well. Hopefully it will become an annual event and next year I’ll have a go!

Had a bit of a homesick moment this morning 🙁

We asked to have a towbar fitted to the new car when we bought it last week. Earlier this week I unpacked and checked over the Thule bike rack we brought with us from SA and yesterday I bought a couple of new number plates. One for the bike rack and one for our trailer – which we also bought over from SA.

This morning I put the bike rack on the car and tested the lights etc, then took off the old Johannesburg “GP” number plate and fitted one of my new Spanish ones.

In a previous life, we would have been loading our bikes onto this exact bike rack and driving out to Northern Farm or The Cradle of Humankind for a Saturday morning ride. That thought just struck me out of the blue and for a moment I missed our old lives 🙁

Chin up Tony, you live in a wonderful area with great people. Just a couple of points re your rack, did you get a revised ITV when you fitted the towbar? It’s a legal requirement to have it noted on your registration. Also don’t forget to have one of those red and white boards when you have the bikes on, again you can be fined otherwise, probably not needed for short trips round the lanes but some jobsworth may stop you for this.

Memories are good, life moves forward, enjoy your next ride; )
And keep up with the grand designs everyone loves a good build.
In your retaining wall don’t forget drainage holes (depends on ground soil, rock conditions). Keep the posts going, thanks.
C

Cheers guys. I rode in the hills yesterday and again today and I remember why we love this place.

PB – the garage that fitted the towbar did us a new ITV, so all good. Will look out a warning board next time we’re shopping too. Better safe than sorry.

Cheers cvilla – yes, on we go!

Ramon the Friendly Farmer has given us permission to use as many building stones from his land as we want to, for our house.

This pile used to be a sheep refuge for bad weather but it fell down sometime before he was born! So these stones have been laying here for at least 75 years and the last time people worked with them was probably around 130 years ago!

I’ll pick out all the useable ones 🙂

PS: This was something Edukator suggested a little while ago 😉

Ramon the Friendly Farmer going down with his old trailer so we can load the first lot of stones.

Two loads later and we have enough stones to keep us busy for a while! We’ve piled them on the edge of our neighbour Javi’s land. Ramon introduced us and Javi is more than happy to help 🙂

It is nice when everyone works together!

Dismantling the existing retaining wall . . .

Taking down the retaining wall is easier than expected.

It’s a dry stone wall, so once you clear the vegetation from along the top of the wall and cut the grass in front of the wall, you can unassemble the stones quite easily by hand or with a crowbar. Then gravity puts them down on the ground for you 🙂

We’re taking away the front face of stones, which go back about 30cm and then clearing away some of the loose rocks that lie behind the front face. All of the stones can be re-used. Ones with decent flat faces can be used on the new front wall again and anything odd shaped can be cemented behind the front face for additional strength.

The final concreted wall will be between 40 and 50 cm thick and behind the newly concreted bit we will leave the original loose stones. Not sure how deep into the hillside the existing wall goes but it looks like it’s around a meter! So, with the new cemented front face, the cemented loose rock behind it and the existing loose rock that is tied into the hillside – we should be fine!

🙂

After one day of wall building with our friends from the UK who live down the road . . .

The girls on the cement mixer, my mate laying stones and me labouring!

We concentrated on getting the corner started, and in the right place according to the limits of the property, and then working our way up the hill. We left one very big base stone in place and after a few meters we were able to incorporate some of the exiting wall “as is” . . .

2nd day of work and the wall is looking good! The corner is solid and the front wall slopes back “mas o minus” the 15 degrees it needs.

We’re making use of some of the very big stones that are there from the original wall. They aren’t going anywhere and they’re in the right place – so it’s fine.

Filling behind the wall with small rocks & stones and cement to give the wall enough depth.

🙂

Nicer weather on your side of the hill than here today then. When you’ve had enough practicing on the garden wall you be ready to build the house walls. 8)

Promo Clip for the “Inframundo” race the other week . . .

[video]https://youtu.be/Z6ce9ShJQ2k[/video]

That abandonned village means something to me. It’s not far from this canyon I did years back:

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJS01hoBbmA[/video]

I don’t recognise the canyon, but the Sierra de Guara park is just down the road.

Keep it up op