We wake up in our respective tents at about eight-thirty in the morning, and boy, is it COLD. See-your-breath-through-the-sleeping-bag cold. Put-on-everything-you-own cold. Which means that we're going to get a nice blue sky, and that should mean that we'll get nice weather at the beach. But it also means that Claire half-froze to death last night, her shoulder's all kinked up and the idea of spending another coupl
e of nights camping near the beach isn't particularly turning her on. At breakfast, she decides that she'd rather cut the trip short at Vejer de la Frontera and head down the Algeciras, where she can get the train back to Ronda. I feel bad - after all, she did leave home at 4AM to drive seven hours to get here - but at the same time, neither of us is going to pretend that the weather is going to suddenly turn splendid and allow us to spend the weekend basking in the sun on the beach.We stop for sweets and quick phone calls in Alcalá de los Gazules proper, then head westward towards Benalup de Sidonia along a quiet secondary highway that's been repaved and tilts ever-so-slightly down, giving us the chance to blast ahead. And that's when the rear cassette goes - just as we're being passed by a group of fiftysomething Brits who are doing a road cycling training camp.
At first it's just a couple of gears, like what happens when you don't oil the cable enough. Then it's the four in the middle. By the time we get to the turnoff to Benalup, I'm down to three gears, nothing more, and even then, if I want to change gears, I have to lean over and pluck the chain over with my index finger. The good news: I'm only seven kilometres from the coast. The bad news: There are two climbs involved, both on roads with no shoulder and lots of traffic.
I bid Claire goodbye at the N340 turnoff; she rides down to the Barca de Vejer bar where, miraculously, she manages to grab a bus to Algeciras about ten minutes later. Then it's an hour of white-knuckling it across the highway (thanks to the traffic more than any inability to gear up and down) and up the coastal road, towards El Palmar. The sea is quiet and calm and, at about 15ºC, way the hell too cold to even think about swimming as we did last year.
So that's it. The trip is over. I made it. I pull into the campsite and Juan, the gardener,
gives me a big wave hello and yells over, "Have you visited the cash machine yet?" (When we were here last year we got caught by a specific dearth of functioning ATMs, and the campsite at El Palmar didn't accept credit cards. It does now.) The cool, wet weather has decimated business at the campsite: where last year you couldn't pitch a tent for love or money, I can count on both hands the number of tents I see in the entire joint. Not good.But, hey. I made it. I made it one piece, had some good stories to tell along the way, and know that I can do a long trip by myself. Not a bad feat for someone who's this close to forty!
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