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| To get ready for all this riding next summer, I'm thinking of planning an early-season training camp somewhere warm. Mallorca seems like an ideal destination (Google Maps, Wikipedia). A lot of European pro' teams use this for their winter/spring training camps. I've heard that there is a lot of great riding on pretty quiet roads as soon as you get away from the tourist resorts. The island is plenty big enough (about 100km wide) to allow for a lot of good long rides, and there are some medium-size mountains to get the climbing legs working. A trip in March could make ideal preparation for a great season of riding next year, plus accommodation should be cheap because of all the empty hotel rooms in their off-season. We'll have our new tandem bike by then, and will hopefully have figured out how to ride it, so will be looking forward to putting some serious miles onto it. It'd be great to have some more company, though. | |
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There has been a few people interested in the Mallorca trip, but no firm commitments from anyone. Therefore, I think we'll plan to go in the last week of March, 21st-29th and if people want to join for all or part of it then please let me know. The first weekend of April I'm busy, and the second weekend is Easter, so flights are already more expensive and the island might get quite busy at that time. Going any time after that sort of defeats the point because by late April the weather in Switzerland should have HOPEFULLY warmed up.
Easyjet don't start flying there from Switzerland until April, so it looks like
Iberia airlines or a combination of Swiss and Spanair (available through
Expedia) are the two main options, either of which require a connection in mainland Spain, but total flight time with the connection is still only about 4.5 to 5 hours. The cost for the round trip will be about 300 CHF per person if you book soon, which includes taxes, fees, and one 23 kg suitcase (at least, that's the case with the Iberia flight from Geneva that we've been looking at).
Our tandem has S & S couplers, so we'll just take the frame apart into three bits and put it and the wheels in two special, regulation-size hard suitcases and not pay any extra fees
. For those of you with more conventional bikes, unfortunately it appears that Iberia charges 75 euros each way to transport a bike, and Swiss charge 110 CHF each way. The bike transport fees might put some people off, or it may encourage you to get
S & S couplers retrofitted to your frame, which is possible for steel or titanium frames, definitely not for aluminum, and probably not for carbon fiber frames. It adds about 250 grams to the frame, and does not affect the ride or stiffness.