Geoff Jones

Another glorious day and a 600 foot hill climb to start with. However, today the North wind blew me along 🙂 still amazes me how much the wind helps against gravity.

I love Spanish roundabouts featuring sculptures and works of art. Todays had a very Moorish feel to them, the Moors were kicked out in 1492 apparently 🙂 The road quietened down after Adra and became a gorgeous coast road with lots of short climbs and swooping descents and a few tunnels. I couldn’t help thinking about the vast cost building it only to be redundant once the A-7 motorway was built. Anyway it makes a great cycle track 🙂 Also fascinating to see the sequence of bridges with the various road reconstructions, certainly pleased it’s all finished must have been hell during construction,

The other fascination for me was that there are no orange groves anymore, replaced with thousands of acres covered in mesh greenhouses growing tomatoes, peppers etc etc They have even terraced the hills with them. Exporting the Spanish sun in tomato paste 🙂

I arrived in Motril to find there is a ferry to Tangier here leaving at 4pm costing €24 for me and the bike. However, it arrives at 1am which is a strange hour to arrive in a new place. So I continued to my hotel.

I thought I was going to have a similar problem to last night 🙁 I think it’s my pronunciation of ‘reservation’ thats doing it. However, The Hotel Estrella Del Mar quickly sorted it out, for the price its good although I think what you pay for in more upmarket places are thicker walls & ceilings 🙂

Strava makes it 63.3 miles and 3,108 feet of ascent at 11.7mph

The Dropbox pics are here

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Yet another excellent days biking. I must be getting fitter or the going is easier as I seemed to be going over 16mph most of the time and I only had to go into lowest gear once for one of the hills. OK the first 30 miles I lost 1000 feet in altitude so maybe it was gravity making me feel fit 🙁

The breakfast at Hotel Felix was very basic a coffee and croissant only 🙁  The roads were very quiet and I only saw a couple of cyclists all day. Just outside Purias there was a white van pop up market so I grabbed myself a banana later on I found a cafe and had a bocadillo & queso (I had to write it on a napkin because they just laugh at my attempt at saying it).

I eventually hit the sea at Playa Quitapellejos where I had a smile at the enormous camper homes parked with their huge trailers. I will now be doing the ‘Costa’ all the way to Tarifa. My first experience of meeting the ex-pats (UK represent 0.6% of Spains population apparently) where a couple where doing their sunday shopping – a bag of ice, litre of gin and litre of tonic water, maybe they had lemons in the garden! I don’t think I could ever live in an estate like Los Marinas but a flat in Garrucha city centre…

After Macenas the climbing began with a couple of peaks over 500 feet, I love these climbs 🙂 the only problem for me is getting down my mind is constantly working out what would happen if the brakes failed going around the hairpins 🙁 Fortunately I made it down OK into the quiet pretty village of Carboneras and the Pension Las Palmas and its very jolly lady who had a good laugh as I tried to follow her Spanish instructions where to put the bike.

The Garmin Etrex and Strava made it 58.2 miles and 1,757 feet of climbing all done at an average of 12.9mph, understated as I pushed the bike around the market and beach car park.

The Strava app and the Moves app just do not like each other at all, Strava cuts itself off and then draws a straight line whilst the Moves app cuts off at very frequent intervals. But who do you report it too? impossible to get email addresses to file reports too 🙁 I guess it’s beginning to expose the limits of having one device do everything.

The days pics are on Dropbox here more to follow, its a painful WiFi connection