Thursday, September 27, 2007

Oh my God, I WON!

Good Lord almighty!! I won the Salomon Women Will competition for Spain!

http://www.salomonwomenwill.com/sp/news/¡¡¡Enhorabuena-a-las-Ganadoras---.html

Good grief! When the hell am I going to get six weeks to cross the peninsula on a bike???

Monday, September 3, 2007

Apologies to the Community

One of the different things you learn about when you live in Spain is that apartment buildings aren't owned by individual people. The owners of the various flats collaborate in the running of the building and making decisions (what colour to paint the halls, who to pay to clean the common spaces....); since I rent, and I don't own, I don't have to get involved in the minutae of things associated with running the place.

Which is probably just as well, since I have just succeeded in doing a wee bit of damage to the common hallway. Here's the problem: I live on the fourth floor, no elevator, and the staircase that takes you down to the lobby (such as it is) is quite narrow. Narrow enough, even, that I've got to lift the bike by the chainstays and take it down the stairs in much the same manner that one would throw a Doberman Pinscher out of the house. This is not as easy as it sounds: Not only does Rocinante weigh about 22 lbs (lighter than a Doberman, given), the tires are really wide. Various points on the mint-green walls have now been smudged with pentagon-shaped marks... if the president of the community ever comes looking for tire prints, I'm done for. Not that she will. She's probably going to come looking for the person who dinged a two-inch wedge of plaster out of the wall on the 3rd floor landing.

Whoops.

THIS is going to be a problem - I can tell. I can tell that getting the bike in and out of the building's going to affect just how much I end up riding in the end....