October was the annual Caerphilly Cycling Club Mallorca trip. Our usual villa wasn’t available this year so we found a new one, slightly bigger, with room for 12 eagerly, willing victims. Unusually it was two 6 berth villas glued together vertically and had two kitchens, three dining areas, a selection of bedrooms and bathrooms, and enough random crockery for us to do no washing up during the week and still have clean plates. It also had a fabulous collection of kitchen implements, gadgets and accessories such that, if we so wished, we could have cooked and presented a roast suckling-pig, paella for sixteen or possibly a traditional Spanish wedding. That said, we still struggled to cook pizza until we realised that the electrics had tripped…

Outside it also had a delightful pool area with solar powered Jacuzzi, barbeque, kitchen and dining area.

Despite the rules about no pets it also came with a cat…

At some point we were going to have to turn our backs on all this indulgence and do some cycling. Bike boxes were opened, a kitty created, a supermarket shop done and the rest of the evening was spent assembling bicycles and fighting off midges. To be fair, it was no contest, the midges annihilated us, except, interestingly, for Shane. Either he had natural immunity or he simply didn’t taste nice. Sarah was arriving separately to the rest of the crowd and coming in on a later plane. Some of us stepped up to the plate and offered to walk into town to guide her back to the villa. In reality it was just an excuse to get away from all the midges. (and the washing up)

Wednesday was our chosen day for the big ride. Earlier in the year Jane had bought me a cycling shirt from Mallorca featuring cartoons of the two classic climbs, Sa Calobra and Puig Major. Having previously done Sa Calobra I was now only one Puig Major short of a shirt.

We chose a shuttle drop off in Andratx which gave us the opportunity to ride the ridge from Andratx back to Pollença taking in half a dozen colls and some exciting descents.

The day had started early with a dark ride into town to catch the shuttle.

Weirdly, night and dawn are rather abrupt over here, no doubt due to the slight closeness to the equator compared to home. So, a brief, dark ride in the chill of the dawn and a successful shuttle rendezvous in town was the start of the day’s plan. The forecast for the week, even from weeks previously, had placed a cloud on Wednesday. Our shuttle host said we were in for a lovely day’s ride with possibly a few spots of rain around lunchtime. This was due to fall mainly on Pollença so we might miss it all together. Later that day we would laugh as we remembered those poorly chosen words… No surprise, Palma has a rush hour so we joined the morning commute and beeped angrily at transgressors and steadily made our way to the south of the island. There were seven of us on the trip, me, Billy, Caz, Sarah, Ade, Tim and Jon. Jane and Marie had taken a different shuttle to Valldemossa to do the same route but just slightly less of it. Other than for a brief chemistry lesson on route we had an uneventful journey and arrived at a dusty car park in the pretty village of Andratx.

The shuttle left us in a cloud of diesel and dust and we progressively took advantage of the single facility in the corner. The route was simple, follow the Ma-10 all the way to the left turn to Lluc, virtually impossible to get lost as long as you could remember Ma-10. The route started with a climb, straight out of Andratx and up the Coll de sa Gramola at 360m.

As we waited at the summit and took in the sea views it was quite apparent that the ride was going to be in two halves. Caz, Jon & Tim were going for the steady, selfie-hungry trip with snacks and stops and who could blame them? They were on holiday and there wasn’t a deadline. The other four of us were going for the press-on technique with occasional stops and who could blame us?  We were on holiday and there were climbs to do. We intended to herd the group together at major stops depending on pace. The route followed the winding coast road. The up tended to give us a view out to sea and then the down dropped us to a small village at or near the coast. Alternately, the climbs turned us inland up through pine forests and rocky outcrops. What was obvious, and slightly worrying, was a rather large black cloud, just off to our left and approaching the coast. The occasional flash of lightning and accompanying rumble of thunder did little to improve the mood.

Climbing Coll de sa bastida 299m, the sky through the trees was heavy and threatening. The bright sunshine bouncing off the tree canopies contrasted with the blue-grey backdrop which was both stunning yet un-nerving. The first drops of rain fell as we completed the climb. Not even rain really, and not a fine rain just the odd big, fat drop that you felt on your leg or irritatingly straight down the gap between your glasses and your head, bouncing off your cheek. We waited at the top for Ade and Sarah and took advantage of a tree. Looking at the storm clouds ahead and the path visible on my Garmin it appeared that we might just skirt the storm, might… It was difficult to tell in which direction it was moving. It was most definitely out at sea and dramatic lightning bolts were ever present but it generally seemed to be static at the coast’s edge – lurking, ominously. It might simply have been following us…

The week had got off to an interesting start. Marie had turned up at the airport with her husband’s passport but no husband. Unfortunately he hadn’t turned up with his wife’s passport but no wife. Consequently we were either one wife too many or one passport too few. We decided on the latter, Marie enlisted help from back home and had the missing passport whizzed over to Bristol to be happily reunited with its owner. Panic levels were medium to high. Marie had also packed some of those delightfully modern washing liquid pods in her baggage.

Unfortunately they weren’t fond of flying and decided to explode in the hold thus ensuring that doing a spot of washing became the week’s first priority. Just to complete the installation of the club into the villa, Fran, in whipping out her towel at the sight of the beautiful pool, forgot the bottle of nail polish wrapped in the towel and launched it in spectacular style across her room. Unfortunately the bottle of polish was no match for Spanish plasterwork so she spent her early evening pool time mopping nail varnish off the wall, floor and tablecloth. To be fair, her embarrassment took most of the week to remove…

We stopped briefly at the summit of Coll den Claret (470m) to pop on rain jackets. As we started the rolling descent towards Valldemossa it was obvious that our stop was one Coll too late. There’s always that feeling that the rain is light and about to stop and you’re hot and sweaty and you’ll burn off a little rain and then suddenly you realise you’re soaked and haven’t put your rain-jacket on. So I put on my rain-jacket, trapping the moisture within but hopefully keeping a little of it out. The descent was now wet. We’d moved from rain drops into a fully-fledged rain storm. We skirted Valldemossa heading for Deia through the now torrential rain of a thunderstorm.

One of the interesting things about Mallorca is that they don’t really do surface water drainage. Sure it sometimes rains, and quite heavily but it stops relatively quickly and it’s clearly in no-one’s interest to put in place any method of controlling it. Gutters seem to just discharge on the path and rough drainage ditches line major roads and possibly head somewhere in a general fashion. Minor roads just flood.

The drainage ditches of the roads we were now travelling down had already reached capacity and were flowing like rivers besides us. These were joined by waterfalls flowing from the retaining walls of higher ground above the road and these were ejecting mud, stones and boulders down into our path below. The road was descending steeply but with occasional areas of levelling out where the water pooled at the roadside.

The traffic here was heavy and paid no regard to the cyclists trying to negotiate the descent. They drove at us trying to avoid pools of water on their side but still raising rooster tails of spray onto us. We had to cycle to our line but it was submerged in places and each pedal stroke plunged your feet beneath the water. There was no space to move towards the centre of the road with heavy traffic in both directions besides us. With the road flooded it wasn’t possible at times to see where the road ended and drainage channel started, yet all the time we were kept towards the verge.

The steep descent was taxing. The roads were slick where not submerged and littered with rocky debris. Gravity was encouraging us downwards but the brakes were being constantly feathered to prevent the speed from building as the unpredictable traffic meant we had to be ready to come to a complete stop or take evasive action. The tyres were just on the edge of adhesion. A little more squeeze on the left brake and the rear slid along the tarmac. I didn’t dare squeeze the right any more as losing the front end here was going to be painful at the very least, possibly disastrous depending on when it happened.

In all of my cycling I have never experienced such a nerve-wracking descent as this. Physically, hands and arms were pumped with the need to hang on and squeeze whilst mentally your senses were over-tuned like a guitar string just ready to snap. Scary stuff.

Finally the road levelled out in Deja, the descent was over and we were utterly and completely drenched. My feet were a good few kilos heavier and my hands numb with the effort of the descent. We still rode through puddles, some still with no idea whether they were hiding a chasm or whether they were just rim deep but plenty had the pedal underwater again.

As the road climbed we found a cafe that was little more than a hole in the wall. We didn’t scope the place for its tourist friendliness, we just threw the bikes in the entrance, piled in, ordered cafe com leche, with sugar, despite being a black Americano sort of guy (it was that sort of descent) then Billy bought the shop…

While we waited, we wrung out our socks, gloves, helmets and anything else we could take off to wring. Anything was worth a try. There was a blackboard over the counter with many Spanish items. Some we recognised, some we didn’t. The lady behind the counter had no English and each time we pointed out an item to enquire what it was, she wrote it on her pad and promptly disappeared around to the rear to commence its preparation. Before we knew it we had a table piled high with steaming Spanish goodness, a chicken salad and a baguette. Thankfully there was nothing with tentacles, eyes or still with a head on. As we ate the rain stopped, the sun came out and Billy offered us his ‘no more rain’ guarantee.

At the same moment the other three turned up looking remarkably dry, calm and unsympathetically happy. Being far cleverer than us they’d simply avoided getting wet by avoiding riding in the rain. They’d picked up a little road moisture, avoided the quickly draining puddles and had a far less eventful ride so far. They even had the temerity to leave us in the cafe and press on to Sóller without us…

A few fat raindrops soon became a familiar downpour and it suddenly dawned on me why Billy isn’t a meteorologist.

We weren’t dry but the roads were drying. There was still the debris of the thunderstorm and the roads were damp but the road was climbing and the sun was warming. It had a long way to go to be undoing all the hard work of the storm but it was all heading in the right direction. After another small coll we started the pretty descent into Sóller. A few fat raindrops soon became a familiar downpour and it suddenly dawned on me why Billy isn’t a meteorologist. This time I stopped quickly to put my wet jacket over my wet jersey just to seal in all that lovely wetness.

As I dressed, Billy, Ade and Sarah came around the bend, gently negotiating the slick corner and dropping down into the town. As we were wet and it was pouring down, hanging around was not really going to serve much purpose so we pressed on but this time down a far less scary descent. As we entered Sóller we passed the rest of the gang now sheltering under the large canopy of a pavement cafe. It was little wonder they managed to stay dry. Their timing was impeccable!

Sóller was wet. Again it was simply beyond normal wetness due to the poor drainage but by now it didn’t really matter. We started the climb out of the town. The sun was out again, the drainage ditches were flowing but keeping their contents in their boundaries and the conditions were improving by the minute. Billy shot past like a man possessed. Having not been to Mallorca before he was pretty much guaranteed a PB on the climb provided he got to the top. Puig Major is a good one. 900m at its summit and the climb starts quite close to sea level. It’s not steep but it is relentless and constant. Its profile does not vary greatly and you pick a gear, put your head down and spin your way through it. It’s not particularly pretty, climbing through pine forests and not as dramatic as Sa Calobra where you can see huge swathes of your route ahead of you. Don’t get me wrong, it’s better than The Tumble but it’s not top of Mallorca’s pile from my perspective.

It didn’t take long until I was through the tunnels and crossing the rolling summit and the descent down to the aqueduct.

The roads were still greasy and the traffic irritating. Braking performance was variable and I had to trade stopping distance for an impromptu overtake on at least one occasion.

Billy was waiting in the shade at the Orange Juice shack. I joined him and waited for Sarah. She shot by without stopping so we had to give chase. Well, Bill did. I’d got some gravel in my cleat at the stop and couldn’t clip in. Consequently I had to ride most of the way back to Lluc monastery part clipped in.

Lluc wasn’t home but it was definitely pea pie time.

As my old drama teacher used to say, “always try to finish on a pie” or something like that – sorted.