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Sheep Walking
With only three days before Oristano's big weekend, we still had to wend our way back to the other side of the island. To our dismay, once we were past Budoni's windbreak of buildings, we found that the blustery headwind that had plagued us for the past few days had intensified another notch. "This will definitely make for some laborious miles," Sharon grunted, as she tried to shrink herself into my slipstream. By the time we reached Siniscola - a mere seventeen kilometers from Budoni - the dry wind had parched us. It had taken us nearly two hours and we had consumed our entire water supply. I spotted a gas station and wheeled in to refill our bottles. As I bent over a tap, an attendant came over and informed me that the water wasn't potable. "Only good for washing," she said. "Oh," I replied, and wondered if the problem was that it had chlorine in it. But before I could ask what the problem was the worker had run to her car. She returned with four oranges and handed them to us. Sharon and I smiled. Without a doubt, the people of Sardinia were the largest collection of kind souls on the planet. We bought some water at a nearby store and wearily pedalled our exhausted carcasses out of Siniscola. The raging headwind greeted us at the edge of town with a fervour; combined with a small rutted farm road, our dismal lack of progress was truly pitiful. We battled more long slow miles into the howling headwind. I was just about to give up when a farm tractor roared past us. "Hey, let's catch it!" I yelled with renewed energy, realizing that if we could get into its mammoth slipstream we would have a much easier time of it. Summoning every fiber of remaining strength we jumped out of our saddles, and pumped our aching legs like some frenzied windmill. With a colossal effort, and nearly out of glucose, I caught it. Sharon was right on my tail. We fell in behind the tractor and the pedalling immediately became effortless. I grinned and glanced at my cycle computer. Moments before we had been struggling to maintain a paltry ten kilometers per hour. Suddenly, spinning behind our massive wind-blocking shield, we were loping at an easy thirty kilometers per hour! I grinned maniacally at Sharon. "I hope he's going all the way to Nuoro!" I shouted. "Yep," Sharon shouted back. "That's only fifty more kilometers!" Alas, well before Nuoro, the tractor pulled off the road into a field, and we were left to slug it out on our own again. Our momentary bursts of adrenaline drained from us and we felt even more exhausted than we had before. Even the wind seemed worse. It roared in my ears like a freight train, threatening to deafen me. I tried to ignore the difficult pedalling (and our lack of progress) by concentrating on the beautiful Albo mountain range; their sharp peaks stood like giant purple spikes against a dark northern sky. To the south lay another range of mountains: the Remules. We were cycling in a valley between the two ranges and, unfortunately, they created a perfect east-west wind tunnel. Heading due west as we were, the strong wind smacked us squarely in the kisser. "I've had enough!" Sharon yelled from behind. "What?" I yelled back. "Let's stop!" Sharon bellowed. We pulled off the road. My ears were numb and my legs were shaking. "What?" I said again. "We're not making much progress anyway," Sharon said, practically screaming to make herself heard above the screeching wind. "We may as well stop for the night." Beside a nearby creek we found a relatively calm spot behind a thicket of shrubs and set up the tent. Wearily, we crawled inside, and immediately fell asleep. I dozed a few hours before I was awakened by the jingling of sheep bells. They had come down to the creek to get a midnight drink. "Don't those critters ever sleep?" Sharon moaned. In a semi-dream state, I replied groggily, "They are asleep . They're merely walking in their sleep. That's why they wear those confounded bells. The dinging wakes them up during their nocturnal ramblings before they fall off a cliff. They jolt awake and shrug, 'We've been walking in our sheep again.'" "Will you shut up and go back to sleep," Sharon groaned. "You're worse than the bloody sheep." |
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