TRANS-ANDALUZ, Day Four: When two kilometres is NOT two kilometres

My vote for the best breakfast in Andalusia: English Country Foods, in the town of Sierra de Yeguas, north-west of Antequera. Run by a British couple who moved back after retirement (her parents originally came from this area), six Euros will get you a belly-filling English breakfast that will keep you going for miles.

Which is just as well, because my plans for the night are to stay in a campsite which I know lies outside of the town of Algámitas. Algámitas sits some 50 kilometres away, on the side of the Zamorano mountain pass. I've biked this way before, heading from Fuente de Piedra to El Saucejo with the gang before, but we didn't make Algámitas to go camping.

And it's just as well: the campsite, which is listed in all the campsite guides as being two kilometres west of town, DOES lie west of town...three kilometres away, and uphill. But that's not the worst of it. The entrance to the campsite is three klicks west of town. Then it's another two kilometres up to the reception area of the camping area, up 10% to 18% grades which are so steep that you have no choice but to keep pushing and keep pushing. I feel like some fourth-rate diva, dodging the cars as they come down from the campsite, muttering to myself, "This is NOT getting any good publicity on MY website!"

Some 1500 metres later, I think, FORGET IT. It's 7:35 PM and if I end up pushing the bike all the way up that hill, only to find out that there's nowhere for me to stay, I will have the Mother of All Diva Meltdowns. So I do what all biking divas do: I jump on the bike, mutter several prize obscenities in the direction of the building that I think is the reception area, and head down to a copse of holm oaks that lay between the highway (well, county road, more like) and the entrance to the campsite.

Now, technically, this is illegal. Not only is the tent being placed on private property, I'm not entirely sure that I'm outside of the one kilometre limit established by law. (You can't camp wild within 1000 m of a legal campsite, but I don't know if that means one kilometre by road, in which case I'm fine, or one kilometre as the crow flies, in which case I'm breaking the law.) But I don't care. I'm angry, I'm tired and all I want to do is sleep. I scout out an area where I won't be seen on either side. I cover the bike with the poncho (still dirty from last year's pernoctation in an olive grove). I put up the tent. (Thank you, Coleman, for your love of green nylon.) And then I sit there and try not to obsess about the sounds of barking dogs, infinitely amplified by the limestone peaks immediately behind me.

I call Candy.

"You all right?" she says.

"I'm a little flipped out by the dogs barking, but I don't think anyone can see me. I'm pretty far away from any road, and the tent is behind a pile of stones. You'd have to be looking for me to really be able to see me."

"All right. But call us if anything happens, okay?"

"Will do."

The worst thing that could happen, really, is that I get busted by the Guardia Civil for camping illegally. That would mean spending the night in a jail cell. Right now that doesn't sound all that bad.

And then the wind picks up, making the temperature drop by a good five or six degrees.

And then the moon disappears, bringing in the rain I'd tried so hard to avoid earlier on in the afternoon.

Damn.

Where are the cops when you need them?