Rakita, Achaea 20141116

Climb to Rakita (well almost) from Patra. My very first ride with real road bike.

0,0k at 0m - Start from AB Supermarket. Meeting point at local supermarket. From here we followed main road by the coast all the way out of Patra. Totally flat and great for warmup. Relaxing tempo.

6,6k at 16m - Roitika. We took a left turn into local road in direction to Pavlokastro. This is where a moderate climb starts. We kept light tempo with higher cadence, still warming up. Just before reaching road "111" Patra-Tripoli, there is short steeper climb - sthg to prepare for later big climb!

12,1k at 215m - Road "111". Short fast section on "111" to very soon take a left turn in direction to Kalavryta / Chalandritsa.

13,6k at 250m - Right turn to Chalandritsa/Kalavryta. Quickly after the turn a short climb and later rather relaxing flat / downhill section to the village. At this point it started to rain a bit :-/ But not enough to bother us.

21,0k at 360m - Chalandritsa, start of big climg. This was the definition of our ride: about 8km climb with average grade of ~9% (+720m elevation) and some spots with way over 12%. This is where things got really difficult especially for me... As I had the small gear in front with 39T (instead of "standard" 36T). It made me to work much harder on bigger climbs and forced me to go into standing position much more often. Anyway, I enjoyed the climb a lot - big efford!

26,2k at 800m - Flat tire. One tiny detail that spoiled the fun was a flat tire somewhere close to the end of climb. It appeared to be a small piece of glass inside the tire that damaged the tube. With help of more experienced riders, we fixed the problem in less than 5min :-D and continued the climb.

29,1k at 1080m - End of climb. The nice part is that all the climb is very well marked (each kilometer and even 200m for the last km). It was nice to finally get to the top :-D The weather though, got really shity, rainny and cold. We continued a bit in direction to Rakita but it was getting late and very soon after we decided to turn around and go home :-P

31,9k at 960m - Turn around and back home with same route until road "111".

38,5k at 690m - Spring. During downhill we took a quick stop for water refill.

57,0k at 30m - After ride coffee. Considering that most (90%) of the return was downhill and it was raining and cold, we decided to have a nice warm coffee and the end (thanks Panagioti).

61,3k at 10m - back home.

I mark it moderate as I felt pretty comfortable all the way up and down, but the Rakita climb is quite demanding and with more challenging efford could be easily rated as 'difficult'. Finally it was ~4h ride, pretty nice for a first time. The weather was a bit disappointing but on the other hand, we didnt need to drink so much :-P
Until next time...