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November 18 Friday Bicycle touring Spain from a willow tree in some farmer's Spanish field to an orchard in Portugal We are grinding along the plateau. There is not much for scenery. I feel like I am on the stationary bike at an exercise club. It is foggy again. It was probably safer to ride our bikes last night than it is this morning in this fog the consistency of pea soup. We cycle ten kilometres and stop in a village to wait for the fog to clear. Cars that had been coming toward us -- when they got close enough to spit on us and our bicycles, they would lay on their horns. We took that to mean: "Get off the road you idiots! I can't see you until I run over you!" No one is around town except for a couple of farmers who are getting their tractors ready. A fellow comes walking along. We ask him where we can buy bread. He points the way as he explains. We decipher exactly two words: plaza and beige. We head off on our loaded touring bicycles in the direction he pointed. We can smell bread, but there is no sign of where it is coming from. We locate a plaza. Everything is beige. We see a guy starting his car and pedal over to ask him. After our blank stares, he realizes that his explanation isn't doing much good. He signs for us to follow him on our bicycles. We do. At an alley, he stops and points. He leaves. We cycle down the alley, but there are still no signs of anything that remotely resembles a place that sells bread. We cycle around aimlessly and find ourselves back at the plaza. It is still too early for stores to be open. They open later in Spain than what we are used to -- not until 9:30 AM for a lot of stores. Sharon decides to oil our bike chains in a little park beside the plaza. I go and fill our water bottles from a spigot I saw. On the way back, I check that alley again. This time a doorway is open a crack. There are no merchandise signs whatsoever, or any other clues as to what may be inside these buildings. I get my eye over to the crack in the doorway and peer in. I watch a woman taking bread out of an oven. She sees me and comes over. I buy two loaves of hot bread. Back at the plaza we quickly consume the choice morsels. I return to the alley bakery and buy three more. With our race to meet Susan and Vicky in Portugal, we haven't had time to eat much in Spain. Since our first night, all we've managed to eat are a few oranges and some bread. Touring cyclists need to consume a lot more food than that. The fog lifts a bit and we swing our legs over our fully loaded touring bicycles and cycle down the road. In the afternoon we pull our bikes to a stop in a little town and buy meat and cheese at a deli. We find some fruit in a store marked Tobacco. Who knew? We never would have found it without specific directions. I've never looked inside a tobacco store for fruit before. We found the fruit by asking an old man who was standing beside a wall by the town fountain. I tried several words to ask him for fruit: fruit, fruita, frutta, fruttah. No recognition of what this space alien could be saying -- nothing remotely familiar. A lady happened along. I look at her and say, "Fruita." "Si. Fruita," she says. Then the old guy, catching on, erupts, "Ah! Fruita!" They both start explaining where to go, each in opposite directions. The old man says, "Tobacco." No, I think, I don't want tobacco. Does he want tobacco? Is he asking me for tobacco? It turns out there are two fruit places in town and one happens to be at the tobacco store. Since I remembered passing a tobacco sign, we decide to cycle there, even though the woman tells us the other store is better fruit and it's cheaper too. But we haven't been able to figure out where stores are in town. There is no main street. We stick with where we know to go instead of wandering the streets on our touring bicycles and ending up back where we started anyway, empty handed. We can't figure out where the stores are, but there are lots of sheep turds though. The sheep are herded through the streets on their way to that day's mowing assignment. We saw a flock following a burro. The donkey was the leader. Just like in real life. The leader is often an ass. The fountain in the village square has concrete lions with water spurting out of their mouth. We cycled off to buy fruit from the tobacco place. When we got there, I couldn't even tell if it was open or not. Sharon plopped her touring bike down and stuck her head inside. An old lady told us to come in. The old woman went and fetched her daughter from the other side of the building. Half of the building is set up for living and the other half is the store. One enters the store and once inside there is a doorway leading to their apartment. We cycled back to the the fountain since there are benches off to one side. It is now siesta time. Even the fountain has been shut off. Wouldn't want all that splashing water keeping anyone awake. I wonder who's job it is to turn the fountain off every day at siesta time? It was probably that old guy standing by the wall. Across the street is a cafe and bar. It is filled with truck drivers having an afternoon nip and nap. So that's where the truck drivers disappear to during siesta. And then they get back on the road and drive. Hmmm. Maybe it's not that great to be a bicycle tourist in Spain after the siesta. It is comforting to know the truck drivers passing me on my little touring bicycle have been passing siesta time by drinking in the bar. Not. The stores are now closed -- it's hard to tell because they don't usually have any lights on anyway. They take their siesta time here very seriously. I'll tell you, the woman working at the truck stop was quite perturbed when I walked in and tried to buy some things during siesta. Combination cafes and bars are the only thing I've noticed open during siesta. But apparently one is not supposed to be buying things during that time. Not wishing to partake in siesta, Sharon and I get back on our fully loaded touring bicycles and continue to grind away across the stark plateau into a voracious headwind. Sharon's pink cycling shirt is now black with road dust and grime. My face is streaked with ridges of dust. I look like a Spanish cyclist for sure now -- only dirtier. A motorhome passes us. A motorbike is strapped onto the rear. I say, "That's what I need." Sharon says, "It sure would look good to have our bikes strapped to that motorhome." "Dream on, dreamer," I say. I stop and take my fuzzy cycling fleece jacket off. We get back on our bikes and pedal down the road. A couple of kilometres farther, we see the motorhome pulled over in a farmer's field. A bloke is standing on the roadway, watching us slowly approach on our fully loaded touring bicycles. I slow down as I get to him. "Got time for a spot of tea?" he asks. "Usually," I reply, as I pull my loaded touring bike to a halt. "But we're in a hurry to get to Lisbon to meet a plane on the 20th." "Do you have ten minutes?" I know when I'm beat. "Oh, sure," I say. We're supposed to be on this bike tour to get away from schedules and deadlines. Smell the roses. Stuff like that. Instead we're churning away in a frenzy on our touring bikes like hamsters on a treadmill. Susan and Vicky won't kill us if we're not there to meet them when their plane arrives in Lisbon. Right? We park our loaded touring bicycles beside the motorhome and enter it to have tea and some sort of round biscuit. Nigel and Rae introduce themselves. They are from Sydney, Australia, and are touring Europe for nine months. But instead of touring by bike, they have wisely purchased a motorhome. They are heading to Portugal. They offer to give us a lift. The headwind has been hampering our forward progress. We decide that Susan and Vicky will kill us if we don't get to the airport on time to meet them. Note: If you ever decide to meet friends who are parachuting in for a bicycle tour, have a place to meet where it doesn't matter if you're a day late. Like a hotel or campground, for example. We load our bikes into the motorhome and set off down the road. After we're safely inside, Nigel says we have to be careful who we trust. We had been standing outside the motorhome when we handed the bikes in to them. He says, "We could have just driven off and left you guys standing there." "Really," I respond, "at this point I couldn't have cared less to see those bikes disappear." He says it has been boring driving the motorhome along this stretch and that he can't imagine what it would be like to pedal a fully loaded touring bicycle in this nothingness for days at a time. "Ah," we shrug. "This is nothing. We've cycle toured across both Saskatchewan and Kansas." Outside, through the motorhome window, the terrain really does look bleak. In fact, I think it is worse being inside the motorhome looking out at the nothingness than when we were riding our touring bikes. We enter Portugal. The road has a sign indicating no cyclists are allowed on it. It is nice to pass the border guards with just a brief wave. We have gone 100 kilometres with Rae and Nigel. It is now dark. Rae and Nigel drop us off in an orchard, somewhere off the main road. People going past must be wondering what the heck is going on. In the pitch blackness, people are throwing bikes out of the back of a motorhome. Nigel and Rae tell us to come and see them when we cycle in Australia. Remember, Nigel says, Death on Flood Street. As they pull away into the night, we push our bikes along a dirt road, looking for a suitable patch of ground. We push our bikes into an orchard, taking care not to fall into the irrigation ditch. We have cycled over 600 km in the past four days. A quick map calculation gives me somewhere around 300 km still to cycle to Lisbon. We have two days to go. Sharon thinks about the possibility of putting our loaded touring bikes on a train or maybe catching a ride with a truck driver. I figure we can cycle 150 km a day -- no problem. |
