This was me going up a steep track above Villelongue and ending up at the houses in the background of this shot. The hills certainly make for challenging rides whether on road or off road.

My new toy, the Garmin Dakota 20 is a small handheld GPS that you can download detailed maps to and then it will record your track, height and statistics for that trip out. This clips to my handle bars and allows me to head off on unknown roads and then find out where I am and how to get back home, brilliant! It includes an altimeter and fluxgate compass.

The Garmin Dakota will download each trip to my laptop so I could keep a record of all my trips out and see them all against the detailed map that I put in the Dakota for my cycling. In 3 months I kept up a record for completing a different route for every outing. The map download was £20 for 600 sq km which seems pretty good value, you can also scan maps and use them if there are Geog graticules to scale to and you can put Google earth images onto it as well. The display above shows different outings in different colours and each one can be selected to display statistics and the elevation profile at the base of the screen.

A lot of bright sunny weather but cool so perfect for cycling, there were plenty of tracks but I did find a few that were cut off by ropes and private property signs. Quite often I had already crossed people's land before seeing the sign, Oh well. I think the summer would be far too hot for cycling around here though.

Watched by some locals in the hills, we had often heard the jangle of their bells but they were often hidden by the cork oak trees. They didn't seem to mind the scrub and steep slopes.