Day 12- Huelva to Matalascanas (60 km)
Weather continues in perfection- :70s and sunny
Traffic: generally pretty light other than leaving city
Bike- : all good, seemed to have goosed a few more days out of current brake pads.
Today brought a decision: either go hell bent for leather to Seville on a long unpleasant day of about 100km next to the freeway, or split the trip in a more indirect but much more pleasant route. Of course I chose the latter, and for the first day anyway it was a great choice.
The way out of Huelva looked to be a really unpleasant slog through a long industrial zone, but once again the bicycle guardian angels/city planners showed up, and I was able to follow a pleasant desperate and well marked bike lane through the city right out to another arm of the Camino erode that had aided me so much yesterday. The industrial zone was turned into a delight with a wonderfully landscaped greenbelt bike path adjoining a long estuary reclamation project. From that perspective, all the huge container ships and cranes and so on were just a cool backdrop. The fun ended at the bridge across to the road leaving town, but I was grateful for all the rest it did give me.
A spooky ride on a narrow pedestrian lane over a bridge later, and I was an even heavier industrial zone. Fortunately, in the middle of this bleakness was the very nicely preserved momestary of El Rabido, the very place where Columbus and his captains assembled their crews, took their last mass, and then set sail across the ocean blue in 1492. Of course Columbus ended up being a little murdery for today's tastes, but that aside, it,s pretty amazing to stand at the site of one of the most important moments of world history. The monetary is very well preserved and beautiful, and nearby there is a little museum that contains full-sized replicas of Columbus' fleet of ships. The latter museum was a little cheesy, and the museum's treatment of the Native Americans on Hispanola downright cringe-worthy (apparently Spain lacks the second thoughts Americans do re: CC), but the boats were neat.
Back on the road along the seashore, I rode past a massive oil refinery, but then things got much nicer as I got into a national park, and what do you know, my old friend the Camino Verde showed up again. For half the way to Matalascanas, the bike path was paved and even veered off away from the road to offer a quiet natural experience for 15 km or so. For the last half, the path went to gravel and dirt, and since there was zero traffic and a huge hard shoulder, I went back to the main road and zoomed along the flat straight asphalt an pt an excellent clip towards the campsite at Matalascanas.
As I have mentioned before, this could not be any more the dead season for these resorts, and the campsite indicated on the map wasn't even open. Not a giant deal, however; since tent camping seems to be more or less unheard of, and non-car camp in even less so, I was able to secure a spot under a lighthouse overlooking the ocean just steps from the beach and a 3- minute walk to town. It helped that the resort was so dead, but just alive enough for a few restaurants to be open. So, after walking the beach for a while and contentedly reading a book in the sand, I had a nice dinner at seaside place and then an enjoyable time tasting wine and exercising my awful Spanish as the only guest at very friendly wine bar. This was an ideal immersion scenario: these guy's English was as bad as my Spanish but everyone was really nice and enjoyed the practice. Plus, I learned all about dried pig leg and many other topics! Good wine, too. I think this guy was pouring me the good stuff just to be nice.
Then back to the tent, where I write this while listening to the surf pound the shore below. Tomorrow I make for Seville!
Day 13- Matalascanas to Seville (90 km)
Weather: excellent, with only exception being 10-20 mph headwind all day.
Roads: mix of busy road shoulder, dirt road and bike path. Mostly light except approach to Seville.
Bike: all well
A longer day than first expected, made longer by a persistent headwind that beat mercilessly on the flat front face of my bike. With the panniers, the B-2 is hardly an aerodynamic masterpiece. But It was definitely a nice start, waking up as I did beneath a lighthouse on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Munching cereal and sipping coffee was mighty fine at dawn watching a fishing fleet ply back and forth, filling their nets with what I imagine were sardines or anchovies.
The general plan of taking the long way to Seville generally worked out, in that most of the way today was pleasant country roads (including another section of another "camino Verde"- though this time it was just a dirt road shortcut). I speculated that some of the middle section, though a national park, must have been originally Roman, because for 20 km though a pine forest the road was flat and unerringly straight as an arrow.
The main sight today along the way was a beautiful town and cathedral at El Rocio, where apparently there is a huge religious festival to celebrate a miraculous statue of the Virgin Mary, which, Excalibur-like, refuses to be moved from the town. They do parade her all over town, together with thousands of horses, ox-carts, and apparently half a million people. They town was more or less deserted when I passed though, though, but the cathedral there displayed her very proudly.
The approach to Seville had none of the charm of Huelva, and I was not rescued by a miraculous bike path on the way in again (not to say there is not such a route- I just don't know it). Instead, as I feared, it was an unpleasant slog through the suburbs on a busy road, which mercifully had a wide shoulder, but a very stiff headwind, and the a huge barrier of an elevated freeway and a river which I had to go far around to enter the city.
But I have worked out a procedure for such situations, which is to plug in my headphones (which normally I avoid as to not isolate myself from the experience), hunker down, and slog. As usual, the unpleasantness proved to be temporary, and once across the river I soon found the network of blessed red-painted inner city bike routes, and navigated to the hostel I had researched previously. I hit the place in late afternoon pretty tired from the mileage, but pleasantly surprised by it being cheap (my days of solo rooms are long over, but sharing a room with an amiable Canadian was not that much of a hardship), possessed of piping hot showers, and as I returned to the common area to relax/and socialize, free sangria hour. Viva frickin Espana.
Exhausted from the riding, spent the evening relaxing at the hostel making new friends and swapping stories. Nice to get to bed early, for tomorrow and the next day I go into more traditional backpacker mode and take in the sights of Seville.
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