TRANS-ANDALUZ, Day Three: Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head

And when it comes, it comes down HARD. Big gobby raindrops, the kind that normally precede tornadoes, bouncing five or six centimetres off the surface of the road. Thank God it's Saturday and there's not much traffic on the roads. Thank God I put on every slightly waterproof garment that I own and am more or less dry in the parts that count, and that there's no wind, so there's no risk of hypothermia. This wasn't supposed to happen. The drought risk for Andalusia was supposed to last straight through to 2008...

Anyway.

Eight-six kilometres in the pouring rain - luckily, most of it on recently repaved and remade roads, and with very little traffic, thanks to the constrant downpour. And what do you know? Renting a cabin at the campsite in Fuente de Piedra is only twenty-two Euros a night (complete with VERY hot water in the shower and very effective central heating over the bed.)

It's not a question of how wet you get the way - what matters is how hot the air is after, so you can get nice and toasty dry!

TRANS-ANDALUZ DAY TWO: Enjoy the Silence

Recover the human geography, I told myself before I started the trip. Yes, bad memories can be just as valid as good memories because they're all part of what makes you human. So every so often, I'll see something and think of something, and think, "Oh! This is the point where we...had lunch...saw the bunny with the red eyes.... took the photos of the sierra... slept in the olive grove..." and then think, okay, that was then. (But was that really a year ago? Has twelve months passed since that happened?)

I made a point of leaving early in the morning. I wanted to get an early start so that I wouldn't have to kill myself to get to Zuheros before dusk, and I was glad that I did; partway through the day, a ring appeared around the sun...that classic sign that rain is on its way. And I just biked and listened to nothing.

Well, not NOTHING, really - the crunch of tires biting into the gravel surface; the slight breeze combing the countless olive trees that followed the route; the sound of the grackles fighting off the crows and hawks. After all the noise of the city, the apartment, after being surrounded and swallowed by noise for the previous two weeks, it was like someone smashing a helmet off my head. Just the sound of... nothing.

TRANS-ANDALUZ, DAY ONE: The hardest part isn't the riding

Every time I go on a trip like this, I never get a good night's sleep the night before. Sleep usually consists of a couple of hours of tossing and turning the night before, stomach roiling like the North Sea, and it's not because of the trip per se... it's because travelling the 1.4 kilometres from my bedroom to the butt end of the Regional Exprés, without a doubt, is a travail worthy of Luis Buñuel.

Today's journey was no exception. Get out of the house at quarter after eight; stares from people all along the street. (I tell myself that they're just jealous of my spiffy new Ortlieb panniers.) There's the usual crush of cars trying to get across Plaza Tirso de Molina. In spite of them literally being bumper-to-bumper, I manage to wedge my way through and head down calle Atocha to the Atocha train station, even getting waved through by a traffic cop. Down the escalators in the rotonda (even though that's not really kosher), to the ticket check: "Do they really let you take that thing on the trains?" I'm there with fifteen minutes to spare. Over to Platform Five, then wait, and wait some more. Even though the train's supposed to leave at nine, it doesn't pull up to the platform until three minutes after, by which time the platform is filled with elderly Andalusians who, fearing that they'll miss the train, crush up to the doors and push and shove each other to get on....kind of oblivious to the bike and the fact that I only have one door when I can get on, as opposed to the ten or twelve that they could, logistically, use. Luckily, a guy my age helps me lift the bike up and direct it towards the back of the carriage, gently shooing the grandmas and grandpas out of the way: "Careful! Dirty!" (an old cry that market porters used to yell to get the oblivious out of their way.) I check my ticket. The only space that they have for bikes on this train is in the back. The ticket office has put me in the front carriage. Again.

I don't mind sitting in the back with the bike; aside from one Galician railman who's deadheading the trip down Jaén, I have the entire section to myself. The Galician and I try to swap conversation, but give up soon after; he doesn't seem to have an ear for foreign accent and his accent is so heavily tinged with galego speech that it takes me a couple of seconds to register what I think it was he said.

And so it goes all the way down to Jaén. And I pull out the camera and take some pictures of wind farms situated cheek-by-jowl with fifteenth-century windmills, the kind Don Quijote used to go after; take pictures of myself with the bike, noting how much looser the Gore-Tex pants are this year than they were last year. And then I pull out my journal and start to ponder: What did we talk about last year when we were travelling down south? All the pictures I have of us, we're all smiling and laughing and you can tell that everyone's just looking forward to being on the road. I craved silence before leaving, and I have it now; but what took the place of that silence before?

Final preparations for the Trans-Andaluz!

Dani from Ciclos Delicias finally called last week to let me know that my new Ortlieb handlebar bag was in (only took, what, five weeks?) so I got that on today, after I picked the bike up from the old bike shop I used to work for. The Owner wasn't there. Either she wasn't there, or she was hiding. Either way, good for me; I've already told them one porky about teaching English outside of Madrid (which is really only a half-lie, when you think of it: I am teaching English -- I just didn't want them to know that I was as accessible as she might want.)

Only two more days before I go. I had a weird attack of The Lonlies in the kitchen last night as I was making soup, hanging out and generally enjoying the quiet that is so often lacking at our place. Seven days by yourself - even if they're seven days when you're going to be staying in hotels and not doing anything super-antisocial like sleeping in olive groves or something like that - is a lot of time by yourself. I just hope that I don't freak out halfway through, get the heebie-jeebies about being on my own or something like that.

Anyway, this time I can't back out. I have got THE PROJECT. And THE PROJECT dictates that I have to do it for real this time, that I can't fink out or back out. I have to do the entire route by myself.

I wonder how long it'll be before I start cursing out THE PROJECT.....?

Biking Singles, Part One

Last Sunday, Claire and I went out for a drink with two guys (well, one guy and his buddy) who she met over the internet, a guy who's just gotten divorced and is looking for people to ride with. Well, we didn't go out for a drink. We spent the better part of Sunday getting pissed. (LM's ex-wife wouldn't let him do that.) Claire says that he's a good biker, that he likes going out on Saturdays up in the sierra and biking around the forestry paths. (LM's ex-wife wouldn't let him do that.)

LM is a nice enough guy, I suppose, but Claire says that she's already starting to feel the pressure of her being the woman who'll do (and let LM do) everything that his ex-wife wouldn't let him do.

I'm not sure that "biking singles" is such a good idea anymore....

I have been living in this city FOR FAR TOO LONG!

Picture the scene: last Monday at 6 pm, heading home, I am rushing to try to beat a particularly fast red light on a particularly short street. I almost made it when BRAAAAAAAAAAP! Some idiot in an ice-blue Ford Focus lays on the horn. He does this as the light is turning yellow, meaning that he's basically pissed at me for preventing him from doing something illegal at a particularly dangerous intersection.

I drive. I know how irritating it is to wait. But I also know that if I sit here at this intersection with this Burberry-clad twit, at some point he's going to say something. I mean, hell, the guy's sitting at an intersection and he's white-knuckling the steering wheel. My heart is pounding, and the only thing I can think of is wrapping the bike around his neck, except that it would be a waste of a good bike. But I can't let this go unchallenged.

Then I see that, alongside the sidewalk, there's a space where I could launch myself from. I (somewhat ostentaciously) pick the bike up, smile at him, carry the bike over to the curb, wait for a moment for a space in the traffic flow....and then I turn around and blow a kiss to him, waggle my fingers goodbye, jump on the bike and RIDE LIKE HELL.

That dude either needs to drive less or drink more. Or trade the car in for a bike. I hope that he has at least one euphoric moment driving his car because, canned up in a vehicle, he's hardly living the TV-ad life of a car owner.

Oh yeah, I blew by him at the following red, too.

Saved by The Hell

Over the past few months, since I told the G-Man to go take a flying leap, I've started to notice how much the little things about him really would not have made him a good long-term partner. (As the Barenaked Ladies famously quipped: Absence makes the heart grow fungus.) There has been a cautious rapprochement since New Year's (initiated and guided by yours truly, since G-Man cannot be bothered to do anything by himself, frankly.)

So G-Man has decided that he's going to start a new job in Suburbialand, leave the big city behind and (he says) have a job that's closer to home that will allow him to bike to work. (No comment.) In starting this new job, G-Man only has four days of holidays during Semana Santa. No skin off my nose, I thought. He still lives at home: Either he'll have the money to do something on his own or he'll scootch off with his parents, like he usually does.

I don't know what the hell got into my head, but for some reason I was feeling overly charitable last week. No, I'll be honest. I know what it was. Elevent months after the fact, he took the photos that I took - I was the only one who'd bothered to bring a bloody digital camera - and made a small video of it. (He'd talked about doing it before but hadn't gotten around to doing it.) And seeing that video reminded me that we really had a good time together, so Dummy Here thought, oh, wouldn't it be great to have him along again....

There's a theory in linguistics that says that native speakers of any language tend not to say more words than the absolute minimum needed in order to get the message across. Well, there are times when I am convinced that G-Man lives his entire life by that idea. I send him a message, saying that I'm glad to see the video and that it brought back great memories, and it's a shame that he couldn't come along on the trip. No response. Throughout this supposed period of rapprochement, it has struck me that, at no time, has he talked about what he wants or what he's prepared to give. As in, I wanna be friends again...but what proof do I have that he does, too?

Cut to yesterday, when, after being online for the better part of an hour, he finally sends me a message. We chat about the usual inane crapola for five or ten minutes, then he brings up the fact that his parents are going to the anti-ETA protest convened yesterday by the Partido Popular (who, it will be remembered, lost the 11 March 2004 elections partially because they lied about ETA being behind the bombings, when it was known, almost from the start, that it was the work of Islamist terrorists.) I won't bore anyone with the details, but G-Man basically cut off the conversation and shut me out once it became clear I didn't agree with him.

And that may have been the final snap I needed. After seeing him behave like a child in a situation like that, I thought, nope. No more kids in my life. So I'm thankful I didn't ask him to go with me. I'm glad that it was nothing more than words in an SMS message, the modern equivalent of words, whispered into the wind only to be blown away, yadda yadda yadda.

Sometimes it just takes the smallest gesture to realize where your priorities are.

Where are all the gearhead girls?

In spite of having something that threatened to turn into a nasty hangover, I almost made it on time. Jorge and Moncho had agreed to meet outside of the Fuencarral metro at 8:30 AM, and I was only ten minutes late. The ride started well, if chilly; and by 10:30 we'd made it up as far as Colmenar Viejo, some twenty kilometeres north of Madrid. And I didn't die. I was sure that somewhere around Tres Cantos I would surrender and have to turn around, but I didn't. I made it all the way up to Colmenar, where we had a break and a sandwich and a breather.

Being that I'm usually one of the only (or few, if Claire's along) girls who go out on rides like this, I usually notice how few women are out on their bikes on Sunday afternoon club rides. What was unusual was that Jorge (who's from Colombia) and Moncho (who's Mexican) picked up on it, too: they also noticed that the riders tended to fall into two groups: either they were older men, dressed in washed-out Lycra shorts, looking to reclaim their glory days; or they were youngish guys, riding very expensive rides. And as we stopped at the side of the road to take a breather and have a drink, even the guys noticed it.

In the end, we counted 12 women. A dozen women among a good two or three hundred men, during the whole time we were out. And that includes the four girls on the tandems and the mother with a kid on the back of the bike.

On the one hand, it makes me think, damn! If I were to join a club and start racing, I could probably be one of the top-ranked riders in the entire community. In the entire province! I could be in the Top 100!

And then I thought, dude-ette, if there are only sixty-eight women competing anyway, that's not really a good sign....