May 15, 2016

Well, what a difference a day makes.  The sun is shining again, but there’s no wind today.  We set off through the town and down the road we went along last night.  The hotel that was closed on a Saturday evening is open on a Sunday morning at 9.30am!

The first five kilometres are all downhill – definitely makes for a better start to the day than 5 kilometres uphill.  After the seemingly endless rain in Andalucia over the past couple of weeks, the locals cannot remember it being so cold and wet in May, the warmth of the sun  has the wild-flowers bursting into a riot of colour.

The road is undulating with more gradual climbs than yesterday’s sharp gradients, giving us the illusion that our legs are not too bad after all.  The same cannot be said for my posterior – it is relentlessly painful.  Good job we’re not aiming too far today.  We are going to stop at the same campsite we stayed at on our 2013 tour, but this time in a wooden cabin – you can’t say we aren’t moving up in the world.

Ken is still fretting about his panniers jumping around a bit when we go over bumps in the road.  He needs some pipe lagging to put around the bars on his rack.  You know your language skills are getting pretty good when you can go into a small hardware shop in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere (envisage the two Ronnies and fork handles/four candles) and explain that you need pipe lagging – remember that this is a part of the world that never sees snow or ice.  Regular followers will remember that he came up with pipe lagging as the solution to a different problem on an earlier tour – I’m not setting out without it in future.