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?