I'm feeling particularly smug, you see just as a week long weather front of really terrible wet weather hit south of England myself, wife and a band of bike mad friends boarded a plane to sunny Majorca for a week of nothing better to do than ride our bikes......bliss!

If you have never been on either a training camp or to the Spanish Island of Majorca well i can highly recomend both. I've been a few times now, along with the other 35,000 other cyclist that need to escape the cold winter of northern Europe, believe me it's not just your fitness that gets a boost from the trip it's also the mental boost that riding your summer bike (if you are prepared to risk running the bagage handlers roulette) and letting your bare legs and arms feel the sun again after months of being covered in layers of windstopper and winter lycra gives you.

We stayed as we always do, on the north side of the Island in Port De Polenca, it's nice and quiet in March as the holiday season has yet to started, so thankfully not an England football shirt in sight and the bars with their all day English breakfast and day old copies of 'The Sun' are still closed for the winter. You can also get into the mountains with a great network of quiet back lanes that apart from a few locals, no one uses.

You can mix your rides well, with flat recovery rides to places like Petra for some great expresso and cake, as well as big mountain rides over to places like Soller, which will have you climbing up switch back turns and up great the slogfest which is Puig Major, at 1500 meters it long enough to get you feeling great to pants and back again!

Now it's not just the racing crowd that use the Island, if you have a summer of Sportif rides or maybe you have got yourself a place in the Etape then you could get a great start to season by coming to Majorca, it's tolerant drivers, big climbs and quite roads are a perfect way to get you ready for any cycling goal you have planned and it also works out cheaper than staying at home.  At 30 euros per person Dinner (each as much as you can buffet) Bed and Breakfast(buffet again) it's a bargain. http://www.pollensapark.com/pollensahoteles/hotel_park_ing.htm

Contact Pedro the manager for bookings and further information.

Trust me, you'll come home feeling smug too!!