Motorcycle Trip - France, Spain, and Portugal

Brian and I just returned from an amazing, memorable 16 day motorcycle trip where we traveled over 4,200 miles through France, Spain, and Portugal. Here's the map of our route:

Each day was like a different vacation - we saw so many types of terrains, ate such different types of foods, and just had a huge variety of experiences. I took tons of notes and photos to document the highlights of each day, so, I plan to blog about each day separately. Yikes! We'll see how I work through it all :)

A few general thoughts:

- We saw spring in fast-forward. When we left Frankfurt, it was still quite chilly and grey. But as we drove southwest, we saw more green, more flowers, and more sun. The flowers in Spain and Portugal smelled so sweet and fresh. Our favorites were the orange tree fields in Spain that were in full bloom. Entire cities smelled wonderful because their sweet smell was so strong. I also loved the lavender in Portugal.

- The variety of wines we tasted was awesome. I definitely have more of an appreciation for the wine-making process after this trip. We enjoyed everything from Bordeaux wines to northern Spanish wines (from the Rioja region) to Portuguese Port and Douro wines to southern French wines. All were extremely tasty!

- You'll hear a lot about the food we ate in my daily posts, but in summary, there was so much delicious-ness.

- We definitely had to get into motorcycle riding "shape" again. We were pretty sore the first few mornings. After that, we were only sore on days that we rode for really long periods of time (7 hours or more in one day).

- We had all kinds of weather. Luckily, the majority of days involved the sun :) But the first few days had some cool and wet times. No huge downpours, though, which was really nice. In the rain we experienced, with all of our gear we could only tell it was raining by the light pitter patter on our helmets. Not bad!

- We didn't have any major problems or issues with the motorcycle. Only had the headlight burn out, but luckily we were in a major city and...well, I'll tell you that story when I get there :) But we were so lucky to have such a smooth trip!

I can't wait to write all about it!