Manzanares to Seville

Unlike yesterday where I followed mountain paths and river valleys, today began on the Spanish Plain which is completely flat and stretches for miles in all directions. Interspersed with what may be but I don’t know volcanic plugs, upon which generally sits an abandoned fort. After Cuidad Real I turned south at Pueblo de Don Rodrigo (wonder who he was) Almaden, Penarroya and then the countryside really changed as I entered Andalucia went through Alanis and the mountains just got bigger and bigger, the road turned into a gravel track and if I was a Doug N-J I would have really enjoyed the next hour and half of terrifying hair pin bends with awesome drops and the sun dead ahead (so at least I knew I was going the right way). This is the National Park and there are deer everywhere but very shy. I suspect they appear on the menu on a few of the bars around here so getting a photo of one standing still was tricky, there are pigs too loads of them eating the acorns under the stunted oak trees. Anyway just when I thought going up would never end I remembered my goddaughter has just reached to summit of Mt Kilimanjaro only throwing up 21 times due to altitude sickness. All of a sudden riding a bicycle from the Manche to the Mediterranean looks a bit tame but I reckon if I’d had one of the oysters on offer on the Ile de Re I could have matched her on the vomit stakes. So well done Nannabel and just as soon as your mother shows me how to find you on Facebook I’ll look into sponsoring you!! xx

Anyway on I went to Cazalla de la Sierra where the weekend traffic was building up for their return trip to Seville, where everyone knows the marmalade oranges come from and they do too they aren’t grown by the acre or hectare around here the orange trees stretch for sq mile after mile. So I joined the Q and chugged slowly into town. I had forgotten how big Seville is and how hard it is to find anywhere to park so in the end headed out towards Cadiz and am happily settled in the Dona Carmela.

Very excited about tomorrow as I will finally make it to Soto to stay with our old mates Anthony and Jill where as ever there will be stogies, copious amounts of chilled white, amazingly good food and all I’ll have to do to earn this is listen politely to A’s repertoire of limericks (days not hours), his Postman Pat and Mrs Goggins joke, the Snake and the Elephant playing snooker joke and let him win at golf. Well it’s hard but someone’s got to do it!