Truck Stops And Hotel Hops

We made the absolute most of the enormous breakfast on offer at Hotel Calatayud. After working through three cups of coffee I found room for a bacon and egg sandwich, a bowl of cereal, several pastries, watermelon, and then some. There were more hotels ahead for the next couple of nights, still no camping to speak of until Segovia, though apparently the campgrounds pick up properly from there all the way to Lisbon — we’d try our luck at a few more wild camps before then regardless.

From Calatayud we rode to Almazán over flatter ground, though Spain kept finding new ways to surprise us — hot rock giving way to woodland and back again. The smell of sun-baked bark drifting off the dried-out forest edging the road became an odd favourite of mine; it reminded me of Idaho. The following day, to Villarejo, we started early with seventy-seven miles ahead of us and a booking to make at the Mira Sierra, and, more pressingly, England were playing Italy that evening — a result I’d rather not dwell on.

Cruising.

The thirty-five miles to Segovia the next day passed in a breeze — two and a half hours, with only two brief stops at our beloved Repsol stations along the way. Not glamorous, but they’ve become our lifeline, especially through the recent stretches where the towns have offered nothing at all; a petrol station means water restocked and a sugar fix secured, and usually a vending machine outside handy for offloading loose change. In the supermarkets it isn’t always easy to follow what a shop has cost when the assistant rattles through the total too fast to catch and there’s no screen to check it against, so I’ve taken to handing over a note the way you would in a loud bar on a night out, which tends to leave me finishing the day with a pocketful of shrapnel.

Morning in the Spanish mountains — glad to be riding alongside you rather than through you today.

When we’re not on the bikes, they’re propped beside a petrol pump.

The day off in Segovia was well overdue — the first day since we’d set out that I hadn’t looked at, sat on, or ridden a bicycle. It’s a beautiful place, a World Heritage Site, with historic landmarks on every corner, more the sort of town you’d bring a girl to than your riding partner, though Eal and I made do with a few beers instead. Almost every tourist we passed was American, mostly teenagers — I began to suspect an entire state must have funded a school trip to Spain that summer, helped along by the high-speed rail line that puts Madrid thirty minutes away.

Segovia’s aqueduct.

Hey Wim — we found a Grimbergen Dubbel on draft in Segovia.

We made the most of the comforts while we had them — one more wild camp lay ahead, and then five proper campgrounds in a row before Lisbon. We were getting close.