Wow

Yesterday:

• left Jose Migual and Isabel´s house
• took train to Andalucia, where there is beautiful southern countryside
• found a perfect road for biking, with hardly any traffic
• biked, pictureque
• torrential rain as we set up tent; all our stuff is soaking and muddy, including our rain gear, jackets and sleeping bags.

Today:

• began biking toward La Yedra, where there´s a farm that we´ll stay at, owned by a guy named Alejandro
• within the first 5 kilometers, got seperated from Kim
• waited, waited
• re-traced 5 k back, and then 5 k forward, looking for her, to no avail
• biked on to La Yedra, hoping she had passed me and was already there
• reached La Yedra, no sign of Kim
• Didn´t have directions to Alejandro´s farm (the directions were with Kim), so I started knocking door-to-door, speaking broken Spanish, hoping someone would know where his house is OR would have internet access which I could use to look up his phone number in my email account
• No one can help; several families tell me they don´t have a home computer and don´t know Alejandro.
• Rain pours, pours down
• I seek shelter under a tree and stay there for 2-3 hours. Fingers are so cold they´ve lost all feeling.
• It starts to get dark.
• This town has no grocery store, no gas station .... nothing but fields and a couple of houses.
• I start planning for the night. Begin rationing my food. Figure in the worst case scenario, I´ll sleep there overnight, and in the morning, if the sun comes out, bike to Baeza, the nearest town with internet, to see if Kim has written
• After a few hours, the sun peeks out .... I walk 6 km to Baeza
• find Kim, who is also biking aimlessly through the streets, looking cold and tired
• we go to internet cafe and call Alejandro, tell him we´re cold, tired and starting to get sick, ask for a ride
• still at internet cafe, writing this. So happy to have shelter and warmth.

We got taken in by the police

We got taken in by the police.

Seriously.

But not in the way you´re thinking.

We asked the woman who owns the cybercafe if we could sleep in her establishment after it closes. She pointed us toward a casino and told us to ask the casino owner if we could sleep at his place.

He said no, but one of his customers, a guy buying lottery tickets, offered to take us in. We got a good vibe from him, so we went with it.

Turns out he´s a sweet, generous guy with a lovely family who provided us with a warm shower, hot soup and cozy bed. Both he and his wife , Jose Miguel and Elisa, are cops. (Hence, as Kim puts it, we got taken in by the police.) They have two kids, age 14 and 11; the elder of the two is going through Spain´s version of an adolescent ¨emo¨ stage, complete with black wrist cuffs and a My Chemical Romance obsession.

Risky vs. reckless

So we´ve changed SIX tires -- count em, six! -- in the last four days.

And we both agree ..... this is starting to suck.

This sounds like an obvious statement, but the roads here are nothing like Colorado´s roads. At home, a bike ride means cruising down a country road where traffic is sparse, slow and consists of passanger vehicles.

Here, the traffic speeds its Autobahn, and the backroads are covered with blind hills, blind corners and narrow -- if any -- shoulders.

Cycling here means riding downhill around a completely blind corner without a shoulder while a semi-truck whizzes by at 100 km per hour, creating a side wind that throws your bike off balance.

Kim, our resident cycle-touring expert -- she once pedaled from Colorado to Michigan -- declared days ago that she hates this. She said she´s only doing it because I want to. And I only wanted to because (1) it was the origonal intent of the trip, and (2) I keep telling myself that if we keep persisting, it´ll become fun.

Yesterday, both of us took spectacular falls (mine was behind a semitruck, though fortunately it was in town on a local street, where traffic was going slow and there wasn´t a car in the path of my fall), and fixed ANOTHER flat tire. We´re physically fine but mentally exhausted.

We decided to pull into Villasequilla, a town so small its not even on the map, and raided the candy store for comfort.

At that point, I decided life is too fragile to do something that´s not fun.

"I´ve been listening to the book The Alchemist on my ipod," I told Kim over ice cream. "It talks about the importance of listening to omens."
"And?" she asked.
"We´ve had 6 flats in 4 days. The airline almost lost my bike. And a black cat has crossed my path twice."

An old lady gave us directions to a park where she said we could sleep, but it turned out to be a playground -- unsuitable for snoozing. We biked a few kilometers south and took a dirt road deep into an olive farm, where we pitched a tent behind some trees and slept as rain fell overhead.

The next morning we started the 22-km bike ride to Mora, hoping to catch a bus from there to Andalucia. Unfortuanately, the winds were howling, and our bikes kept blowing off course -- especially as trucks whizzed by.

I turned to Kim. "We could backtrack 2 kilometers, or keep going another 20."
She shrugged. Neither of us wanted to quit.
So we flipped a coin.

True to the omen, the coin told us to backtrack to Villasequilla.

We asked a girl on the street about train schedules out of town; she said a train appears once a day, at 5:30, and goes to Aranjuez. We spent all day sitting around waiting for 5:30 to appear, but unfortunately - with no actual train "station," and with no signs or schedules to guide us - we were waiting on the wrong side of the tracks. The train passed by without stopping.

It rained overhead as we watched the only train out of town disappear into the distance. To our left, a shephard and his dog led an enormous flock of sheep at the edge of the fields along the opposite side of the track.

So we´re here for another cold, rainy night. We´re going to ask the owner of the cybercafe if we can sleep on her floor in exchange for cleaning the place. Hopefully she says yes. If not, we´ll return to some field out of town and catch a bus to Toledo tomorrow. There´s only one bus that runs out of town each day, and it leaves at 3 p.m., headed for the ancient Spanish capital.

What a day!!

The sights from this morning was what I imagined a bike trip to Spain to be. We took small, windy backroads without much traffic that stretched across vast expanses of green fields, linking small Spanish village to small Spanish village, each one marked by an ancient church steeple.

We cycled 30 kilometers and stopped in a little town to eat lunch and wash our hair and clothes in the bathroom sink. Kim drew plants while I played on a nearby swingset.

Then we tried to get back on our bikes .... that´s when the afternoon took its first of many turns. Kim´s tire -- the same one she patched yesterday -- went flat. We tried to repair the tube, but it wasn´t salvageable. She put in her spare tube. That too went flat, and all attempts to patch it went in vain.

We sat on the sidewalk all afternoon, wondering what to do. We were surrounded by crops; there was nowhere but a small ditch to sleep in. We thought we might sleep there, and tomorrow Kim would stay with the bikes while I backtrack 30 km to the nearest cycle shop we know of.

Then a local family walked by and asked if we needed help. They were the first people we´ve randomly encountered who speak English!! We explained our situation and they drove us to a mechanic shop at a nearby town, where Kim bought a tire tube and extra patch kit; then they invited us in for dinner, showers, and a bed to sleep in. I´m writing this blog from their computer.

The couple, Francisco and Isabel, are SO wonderful; both are high school teachers who specialize in tourism and hospitality. They gave us a detailed road map to take with us, cooked an incredible dinner, and welcomed us into their warm, comfortable home.

I love sleeping outdoors -- watching the moon wax, hearing the crickets -- but when you´re cold and stranded and eating stale bread and contemplating sleeping in a ditch, you really, really appreciate a nice home! That´s partly why I love to travel on a shoestring .... it makes you really appreciate the daily comforts you take for granted.

2.5 days on our bikes

Kim and I are in Illescas now ....

On Day One we spent most of the day hauling our bikes up and down at least a dozen flights of stairs at three Metro stations, en route to the southernmost station out of Madrid. It was a three or four hour ordeal, during which I managed to pop my front tire tube in the process. We stopped for a late lunch at a Moroccan dive filled with about 25 Moroccan men and no women. They eagerly insisted on changing my tire and walking us to a gas station, where we used Kim´s converter to fill the tube.

It was late by the time we began riding, we went 10 kilometers before it was dusk and we slept in an abandoned shack by the side of the road near Grinon. We awoke the next morning to the sound of the voices of the farmers who own the shack .... they stood really close to us, talking, and even drove their tractor by us, but never saw us. I told Kim it was a ´Jedi mind trick´ .... since they weren´t expecting to see us, they didn´t.

Yesterday was FREAKIN WINDY and hella terrifying; the winds were so strong my front handlebars would jerk side to side and I felt like I had no control over the bike´s direction .... 3 feet to the left means a certain death, with cars speeding by at 100 kilometers an hour. We slept in a park in Yuncos at night, and backtracked to Illescas today to find internet so we could GoogleMap a less-traffic-y road, if possible.

We´re ultimately heading to La Yedra, though it looks like it´ll take much longer than expected .... our slow butts went only 30 kilometers yesterday. We wake up around 10 a.m., pack the tent by 11, stop to hand-wash our bike shorts and eat lunch and look at maps and mess with our seat positions and shoes and other bike components, we want to start setting up camp by no later than 7 pm each night before it gets dark .... all of it takes time away from biking, and I imagine, after today´s GoogleMapping and a stop at the grocery store and stopping to hand-wash our bike shorts, we´ll probably go 40 km today .... maybe 50 km because there´s relatively little wind today. We´ll see.

Whether the weather

The bike and most of my luggage has been found -- one camping mat is missing, everything else was returned. (For the record, NEVER fly TAP Portugal airlines). The weather, which is Spain is normally sunny, has been chilly and rainy since we arrived. It's expected to clear up tomorrow, which is when Kim and I will bike south, chasing sunny skies.

The plan is to leave Madrid tomorrow on our bikes, head to a farm run by a guy named Alejandro, stay there for a week, spend two weeks ambiguously biking through the south (maybe pedal to Cordoba and Seville .... we have no solid destination for that time). After that, we'll return to Madrid to greet my parents when they fly in on May 7, spend a week with them, and then return to the south, by bus, to spend four weeks on a Spanish-speaking-only farm in Málaga. We'd leave the farm June 10, bus to Germany, and spend a few days there before Kim flies out June 15 and I fly out June 17.

In the meantime, we're staying with Kim's friend Matt and his two Spanish roommates, Juan Carlos and Leida, in an apartment in Madrid's financial district. Hanging out with them feels like the study abroad I never had -- its a nice insight into the day-to-day life of studying and working in Madrid as a young twentysomething. We've visited several parks and eaten at some of their favorite tapas bars, but for the most part, we're avoiding "touristy" attractions -- museums and so forth -- and focusing on the residential experience.

As is always the case with traveling, something as simple as going to the grocery store can be an adventure, leading you down narrow cobblestone paths with hundreds of balconies overhead and a centuries-old basilica on the corner. Normally when traveling, we can relax and go with the flow, but putting together a bike trip -- where specifics and details matter -- makes it a bit more challenging. I spent the better part of a day trying to find isobutane for the camp stove before giving up -- apparently Madrid lacks camping gear, and hey, bread and brie is cheap here :-)

A bike trip without a bike?

I arrived in Madrid yesterday, but my luggage didn't. My nice sleek little road bike, my panniers, my biking gear, my solar charger -- all in the hands of TAP Portugal airlines?? I'm hoping for the best and trying to visualize recieving my luggage, but I have a sinking feeling about this ....


Fortunately, Kim has a friend in central Madrid, and we can stay in his apartment for as long as it takes for the luggage to come. That's a better option than camping while we wait, especially considering that my sleeping bag and camp stove are in that luggage ....