Diary written by: Bernt Pölling-Vocke ( bernty@gmx.com )

Just as I had more or less hoped in advance the last stages of our tour became quiet a challenge once again. Suprisingly Frank was the one who got out of bed way after me today and when we hit the road around noon we were not only met by a clear sky and damn "nice" weather (at least if you had a day at the beach on your mind) but also a bunch of steep hills along the coast.

There was also some wind during the first kilometers but while the wind stopped bothering us the road remained the same. Most climbs were rather moderate but there were a lot of them, I counted nine countable climbs on the stage with two of them being very challenging but with our final destination just two days away nothing could really bug us anymore. And the nature made up for it all anyways, the Costa Brava might not have been a pleasure for our legs but it was for our eyes...

Thirty kilometers into today´s stage we made our first stop and I had the crazy idea to get myself a copy of the european version of the USA Today, my favorite daily US-newspaper. I should´t have wasted my money on the slim european version in the first place, I definetly should have skipped the sports-pages as well.

Not everything in the world is worth the money it commands and when I had to digest that "my" New York Rangers had just obtained Eric Crybaby Lindros from the Philadelphia Flyers, well, I just didn´t get it. Why did the Rangers hire Glen Sather as their general manager in the first place? If they would just dump money on available question marks keeping Neil Smith would have been just fine, he was very good at this and bought a Stanley Cup in 1994 so why the same again? I just hope the Rangers gave up enough talent to get the Flyers their first cup in an eternity, I have absolutly no sympathy with this move by the Rangers management and I am sure that in the end Eric will retire with a bunch of money just a few games into the season and the Rangers will be down the players they traded away for him, stripping a little talented roster with some of that for nothing but trouble in return...

"Sad but true" became the theme of the day when we cycled through the well-known city of Loret de Mar just a few kilometers later. I had already seen enough cheap hotel-cities so far and Loret was not able to really top them all but once again the city served as a shocking display of a shocking vacation-style. To say that most places looked "cheap" would put it into nice words, I also spotted the first McDonalds and Burger King "restaurants" since we had entered Spain, not really a good sign I guessed.

After 60 kilometers today´s stage already ended in Malgrat and pretty close to Barcelona. Frank developped some knee-problems througout the day and we are really in no hurry anymore. The stage was also tough enough with those nice climbs and the hot weather so that 60 kilometers didn´t feel that bad...

Malgrat?

Hotel after hotel, one uglier than the next and ten times uglier than the one before. Masses of tourists to our left, right, to the top, everywhere. A great place to stay?

We started to check out some hotels, the first one was booked, the second wasn´t completly booked but very expensive (without a visible value for the asking-price) and at the third hotel the people working at the reception didn´t even know the single-night-prices of their hotel and didn´t know that it is considered friendly to choose eye-contact with customers asking for a free room. There was also a poster advertising some bavarian idiots who would "rock" the hotel at night, there was nothing I could do but run..., run far...., to the fourth hotel at least which was sold or booked out once again. Knowing that there wouldn´t be too many rooms available anyways we returned to the rather expensive 2nd hotel where the front desk staff had turned unfriendly as well by now. It would only be for one night so what...

I just don´t know why normal tourists choose to end up in places like this, and they end up in bunches, bunches of bunches, bunches of bunches of bunches. A camp-site for female-tourists in Afghanistan prior to the fall of 2001 would be a lovelier place to stay for sure. It would also be cheaper, probably...

Headaches followed, just too much crap to swallow. The room had to be paid immedeatly, it was not possible to pay by card as the computer was down at the moment and payment was not allowed at a later point of time. I also had to turn in my id so that they could copy it. "You can have it back in an hour", well, great, they can take an hour to copy my id but they can´t get their computer going again so that I can pay later? Doesn´t make sense? Right, it doesn´t...

And our room? Well, at least not a complete disaster. But with all those people running around here I wouldn´t leave anything of value inside. Frank was a bit scared in downtonw Perpignan some days ago, I am scared in the middle of all the idiots here....

Headaches, curses, headaches...

What in the world is the ETA for anyways? Why not a bomb right here, right now to end all the misery around? One hotel after another. Tennis-courts? Sporting facilities? Basically anything to do but cheap hotels and uninviting disco-clubs? Not really..., breakfast is only served until 9:30 as well, I guess the management knows that most tourists are too drunk to get up that early and that they can save some money by those restrictive time-frames. You don´t have to be dumb in order to entertain dumb tourists, never said that. Really smart people around here...

If god had known that mankind would put cities such as Malgrat on the planet he would have stayed in bed on the 6th day...

Okay, honestly I have to admit that I have done tourist-like vacations as well in my live. But on the other side I or my parents have always tried to choose places with at least a bit of style, wether in Austria or Greece. I also enjoyed Disneyland in Florida a lot which would probably be classified as very tourist-like but nothing has ever been close to this cheap, this dirty, this overcrowded, nothing... Are 95% of all females blond by the way? Just a question that comes to my mind at the moment..., might have to do with the type of customers this city attracts as well...

I would prefer Barcelona any second, a trip to the moon, anything, but one night will be possible here. I can´t deny that Malgrat is also funny to a certain degree even though it would be unhealthy to tell the people around here why I think it´s funny. Very unhealthy indeed...

Still no signs of the ETA....

2nd entry of the day:

After eating at a rather crappy italian place we strolled once down the street and back and tried to take in as much as possible of the misery around. Every two meters you have some rather muscular idiot waving some advertisment for some disco-clubs around the corner and they just don´t get that I have absolutly zero interest in their shit. Mabye it´s because most people here have and nobody with a clear mind without interest would be here in the first place unless by bike. I can still see this old guy, suprisingly not all tourists here are under 18 and can´t afford anything else (in which case going on a vacation here might not be such a dumb and bad choice after all), with his beer-belly and his unbottoned hawai-shirt at the beach, "sad but true"....

The evening wasn´t very succesfull for me from a competitive point of view as well. I not only played some pretty poor pool (1:3) but also dropped two straight games of chess (which happens rather often, can´t attribute this to the surroundings). Life is tough but at least people show some sort of respect around here when you tell them that you didn´t travel here stuffed into a bus but on your bike. Most people don´t believe it, oh well, I don´t believe what is happening around here as well....

We didn´t tell anyone about the Mont Ventoux, once again this could have been unhealthy and all those people who didn´t believe that we were here by bike would probably never believe that we also cycled to a mountain in order to cycle up and down just in order to loose a day and to have some fun. A strange kind of fun by the way....

Chess statistics:        Bernt vs Frank         3:17:1