The Road to Denia

There is a perfectly good flight from Cologne to Alicante. It takes three hours, costs less than the fuel for this, and lands you ninety minutes from Denia with your spine intact. I have taken it. It is fine, in the way that a microwave meal is fine.

The alternative is four days, three countries and one motorway tunnel under the Alps’ western shoulder — and the small, stupid satisfaction of having watched the landscape change rather than skipped it. Rain leaves somewhere around Burgundy. The roofs go flat and orange in the Rhône. By the time the Montgó shows up on the right, you have been cold, overheated and rained on, in that order, and you have earned the beer you are about to describe as “just okay” to be polite.

Why this route

The Costa Blanca stretch I am supposed to be writing about starts at Denia, so Denia is where the ride stops. Getting there over four days rather than two means Beaune instead of a service station, the Massif Central instead of the A75 at full tilt, and Girona rather than a Barcelona ring road at rush hour.

Spoiler: one of those four days went exactly to plan. The stages below are in the order they happened, which is not the order I had written down.