April 19, 2013

We decided last night to get up extra early today to try to get as many kilometres covered as possible before the main heat of the day. Unfortunately, I awoke feeling dazed following my second restless night in a row (the air conditioning didn’t work in our room and there were mosquitoes so I had to stay under the covers to stop them biting me and then I was too hot to sleep). Nevertheless, we’re getting into a routine now and we made a fairly quick start. The road out of the town was up and down, with hills all over the place, but very quickly we dropped down onto the plains, pan flat as far as the eye could see. I was surprised how much we had recovered from our hard day yesterday despite the lack of sleep and we soon were whizzing along happily. The road was pretty busy and there were quite a few lorries, which made it less enjoyable than it should have been, but we were making good progress until…….Ken picked up a shard of glass in his rear tyre. All our efforts to get out early were for nothing as we had to unpack the whole bike, patch the inside of the tyre and fit a new inner tube. Very frustrating. Still, even with that set-back we still made really good time to reach the furthest outskirts of Sevilla.

Sevilla, in common with most large cities in Spain, has a beautiful historic heart, surrounded by street after street of modern flats, surrounded again by seemingly endless industrial buildings, all circled by a network of motorways. The route of the original roads are often incorporated into these new motorways during their construction. The result is a city which appears on the map to have no obvious access for the cyclist. We were, therefore, forewarned that navigating our way into the city and out again the other side was going to be a nightmare. We would normally avoid such a situation, but on this occasion there was no choice because the only bridges over the river Guadalquivir anywhere near where we want to be are in Sevilla itself. As we approached, I stopped at a bicycle shop to ask the best way into the city by bike – this provoked much head shaking and advice not to attempt such a thing before I emerged clutching a hand-draw map. Didn’t really inspire us with much confidence. As we followed the map, we checked with other pedestrians along the way and got a similar reaction to the man in the shop each time. The only option appeared to be to use the industrial service road which runs right alongside the main motorway. These types of road do not exist in the UK but are fairly common here in Spain. The problem is that there are slip-roads on and off the motorway every few hundred metres along these service roads and all the time there is the potential for the service road itself to turn into a slip road onto the motorway. Needless to say we suddenly find ourselves riding down a slip road onto the motorway; we stop at the side to consider our options. We can’t turn round and ride the wrong way up the slip road to get back off again, we can’t continue on unless we want to end up as road kill on the bonnet of a 40 ton truck. At the side of us is a concrete wall about five foot high with a long drop the other side onto waste ground. About 100 metres ahead the concrete wall ends and a metal railed fence starts so we decide to get there, unload the panniers from the bikes and throw them overs the rails and then lift the bikes over. I get there first and start unloading my panniers and throwing them over the fence – straight into the carcase of a dead dog; a very big, smelly dead dog. Twenty minutes later we’ve got everything back together again, none the worse for the experience – the third time today we’ve loaded up Ken’s bike. Fortunately, we were able to pick up another service road running along the end of the waste ground which took us off into a suburb of Sevilla. Phew! We’ve made it, or so we thought, as we found a cycle track heading in the right direction

Two hours later we’re still riding around Sevilla on a cycle track. It was like riding to Nottingham via Newcastle. Eventually we stopped following the cycle track and just looked for landmarks. We spotted the top of a distinctive bridge on the skyline which we knew crossed the river and not long afterwards we cycled across into a deserted Olympic village consisting of a range of impressive sports facilities and a hotel complex. Apparently, it was all built for a bid to host the Olympics in 2002 which failed and has never been used since. Still it provided two weary cyclists with a bed for a night so a few million Euros weren’t wasted after all.