Day 41: Granada to Priego De Cordoba (85 km)
Weather: Overcast in morning, clearing and warming to partly cloudy in afternoon. Mid 30s in morning, warming to high 50s
Roads: Moderate traffic on major road out of town, reduced to very light once I hit smaller roads
Bike: Brakes and shifting slightly improved, but good enough
I am not sure why I tempt fate by writing things like in the last entry about how flat this section would be. I will grant that it was flat-er, for the first 25 km on say 41 and the home stretch on day 42. But the rest was pretty darn hilly, and longer than I anticipated, which made the plan to do this in 2 days kind of a stretch. I am starting to run short of time, though, and to allow for other potential unforseen snafus getting back to Lisbon, I'd love to have that extra day.
Anyway, now that I have that complaining out of the way, I will say that once I cleared the kind of grimy outskirts of Granada (fairly easily because as I mentioned it is flat), I once again found myself in a now familiar world of Spanish villages and windy mountain roads. It's late fall here and much of the landscape is a tableau of browns and dark greens, and most of the rolling hills are taken up with orderly rows of love trees.
For most of these farms, it's harvest season, which seems to be done as it has been for centuries- with guys setting a tarp under a tree and beating it with poles until the olives fall onto the tarp. When I would go through towns, the next stage of the process was evident- the olives arrive by truck to collection areas, which have machines to desperate out the leaves, and then they are salted, crushed, and pressed, to remove every last bit of oil out of them. It seems staggering to believe there could be demand for this much olive oil, though I imagine it has to be one of Spain's significant exports.
Anyway, I just plain ran out of daylight around km 85, even though I wanted to go farther to make the next day easier. The good news is that a great dispersed campsite showed up just at the right time. Perched on a clifftop overlooking a scenic gorge and slopes of olive trees, it offered a very pleasant place to lay my head for the evening.
Day 42: Priego De Cordoba to Cordoba (120 km)
Weather: overcast most of day, spitting rain toward end of day, high 30's in the morning, warming to upper 50's.
Roads: very light traffic most of day, a little heavier when on more major road through park.
Bike: same could use a tune, but all systems nominal.
Though this was a long day and no mistake, at least I knew that going into it, so I could prepare mentally and physically. When I am camping, there is generally little to do after sundown at 6:30 or so, so after reading for a while, I am generally asleep by 8 or 9. Even making up for hostel nights, I don't need more than 8 hours, so it's not difficult to be up and at 'em at the crack of dawn (which is 8). So, making the most of the daylight, I was on the road early and chugging up the mildly sloped 1000 vertical foot pass through Sierra Subbeticas National Park. Shortly beyond this, I was able once again to take pleasant small roads through olive grove farmland and a few villages, this time trading elevation not in the thousands of vertical feet as I had been doing since Ronda, but in a few hundred at a time. I was feeling strong for most of the day, but 120 km is a long way, and I do admit to uttering a bit of profanity when the last 20 km of road turned really bumpy and a fiendish set of hills, and a drizzly rain right at km 110 made the home stretch a struggle.
But gritting my teeth and gutting through it, I was soon crossing the famous Roman Bridge, passing the exquisite Mesquita mosque, and checking into a very pleasant hostel in the hear of town where a couple Euros extra got me a private room to snore my heart away in. The showers were surprisingly functional (not sure why Europe seems to struggle so with this technology) and above all hot, and I bought myself a congratulatory dinner. Hit the sack early, due to being totally exhausted, but pretty darn satisfied with myself for completing the bike tour leg of the trip.
The plan now is to bus it back to Lisbon, and figure out how to do the bike box shuffle once I am there, hopefully avoiding getting totally ripped off getting my bike in its box from town to the airport, as I was the other way around. I have heard mixed things about how easy it is to transport bikes around Spain, but I guess I will find out tomorrow. It's a little sad that the bike, so long a liberating asset to me, is now transforming back into the albatross it was starting the trip...
Also I am sure I will put in an entry summing up my thoughts about the bike trip in general, but having just completed it, my main feelings are overwhelmingly positive. It's a very different way to see a country, to be sure, but has some huge advantages, and I can't say that I have any significant regrets. But I ramble. Tomorrow, the lovely sights of legendary Cordoba!
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