Three Cheers for Arroyomolinos!

Okay, if you've never been to Spain, you've probably never heard of Arroyomolinos. It's a suburb-commuter town located about twenty kilometres south-west of Madrid. I don't really know how many people live there - technically, it's probably a part of the city of Móstoles - but I want to give them a quick tip of the helmet for having inaugurated twenty-two kilometres of bike lanes throughout the town.

Given, twenty-two klicks doesn't sounds like a lot, but given that we're talking about a place that doesn't even have ten thousand residents. However, that just might make them the community in Spain with the most kilometres of bike lanes per capita.

Three cheers for small towns!

Madrid, get your act together already!!!!!!

Bikes Belong. (And everyone else?)

There's a funny debate going on with the Pedalibre group about the use of bikes in the city, and it's brought out some funny alliances.

José M., who's a PL member I don't know, went to his local golf club with his son about a month ago and was asked to leave because the golf club didn't feel that bicycle use gave the club the appropriate image. José hasn't said how long he's been a particular member of the golf club, but he was offended enough to send a letter off to the governing council of the club, asking them what was up with the anti-bike policy. (Spaniards are great whingers, but not many are willing to take action beyond flapping their gums.)

Then the real controversy started. Several members, almost all of them car owners, started in on José for being a golfer. One wrote: "It's hardly consistent that someone who's interested in the environment should take part in a sport that's aiding and abetting the irresponsible use of water." Another took José to task for participating in a sport which could be considered elitist at best, and a third – this killed me – said that it was ridiculous for a child to play golf, that a child should be doing better things. (And yes, if you're wondering, Spain does have a problem with child obesity, too.)

OK, first of all, let’s address the fact that José, evidently, is one of the few men brave enough to go on a bicycle with his children in this city. That, in itself, is pretty commendable. But I don't get this mentality that says that all behaviour has to be perfectly aligned with one point of view or another. I mean, how many cyclists have drivers' licenses? Exactly. One thing doesn't have to cancel the other out; not every form of behaviour is going to be 100% coherent in the eyes of the other.

Personally, I think José wins on more than one point. Not only does he get to take his bicycle with him to the golf club...he's also shown his son that it IS worth fighting, in a civil manner, for what you believe in.

Life is a secondary highway with two weeks free....

So I'm sitting at home this morning, doing some proposal letters and generally mucking around on Messenger, and it hits me. Doesn't hit me like a ton of bricks... it was more like a Philadelphia Cream Cheese commercial, with shining lights and harp music...

Hot diggedy double damn!!

I'm totally free!!!

I just got paid....

There is no man hanging around to explain or justify things to....let alone one who would want to come along....

There's no job to report back to...

I could very well jump on my bike and go straight back to Tarifa, if I damn well felt like it!

And for once, that freedom is not daunting...it just feels VERY VERY COOL. To realize that you're free of the normal constraints which keep you from riding is great. It's not likely that I'm going to take off at any point in the next day or two; but knowing that I could do it (the rent is paid, the invoices have been sent, the deadlines have been met for this month....), the temptation to take off next week is enormous. After all, what am I going to do here? Sit here and moan that I'm unemployed and that the G-Man doesn't love me? Yeah, right.

Truth is, the weather has, for the most part, been freakishly good this fall. Daytime temperatures have averaged around 20ºC, even in Madrid, and with the exception of last week, with the rain, it's been very dry.

So, where to go? The Camino de Santiago beckons, to be honest. I would really like to do the bit I haven't tried, going between Logroño and León...even over a week, that would work. Almería would be great, but there are no regional trains going down there and I don't feel like fighting the ALSA bus company to put the bike on the bus (though if I travelled Tuesday at 10AM I would be HIGHLY surprised that anyone would care.)

Oh, the siren call of the open road...if I didn't have to go back to Canada at Christmas, I would love to take the time to go to all around Spain, and really do it by myself this time. And do it RIGHT.

Get your digs in! Only an HOUR left!!!!

I can't believe this. Yisus just snapped at me because the owner only paid him €30 for the stupid bike repair workshop. "I could sit at home playing with myself for that kind of money," he hissed.

Well, why are you bitching at the person who's leaving in an hour? I thought.

And then it hit me...the rest of the staff don't know that it's my last day.

OK, for the rest of you who want to have a go: you have sixty minutes to behave like assholes and whine about anything you want. After that, you all have to leave me the hell alone because I'm going biking, not doing power-f***ing-point presentations about it. Are we clear????

Better solo than badly accompanied (Part One)

The Transibérico is the bike trip that was supposed to be the big trip for G-Man and I, but after last night (more personal, inter-cultural relationship crapola, nothing that's suitable for this blog because it's neither Spain-specific or has to do with biking) I think I've decided that I want to do this by myself. I don't want to have to spend a month with someone who doesn't love me, living in a tent and biking 100 km a day; I don't want that failure of the relationship rubbed in my face.

Besides, I know what's going to happen. He'll get all involved in some big project or some class or something and even though he'll have known about the dates for a year before, six weeks before we're due to leave, it'll come to pass that oh, he can't go. And I would like to leave this relationship with more than the memories of how I was disappointed.

Priego de Córdoba Tourism Conference...post-conference post

One of the Match guys I was seeing, (or, more accurately, I saw once and never saw again) said that he didn’t want to move back from Córdoba, where he was from, because he said that Córdoba ages people prematurely. After this morning’s trip from Priego de Córdoba back into the train station in Córdoba, I believe it.

David, the driver in charge of taking us around, didn’t realize that he was supposed to be taking me back to the city this morning and when Cati, the conference organizer, asked him to do so, he asked if it would be all right to double up on a trip that someone else had booked, an older woman who needed to be taken to the Reina Sofía Medical Centre in the city. And I was like, cool, I don’t have a problem with that...and the nice part was that I got a tour of some of the smaller hamlets in the subbética, like Zagrilla and places like that which I know that I’ve always thought about travelling through by bike but never did. (Just as well: up until now I sincerely doubt that I would have been able to handle that much hill riding.)

So we went through Carcabuey, which is where David is from, to pick up this woman and her nephew. Nephew is probably a couple of years older than I am, balding, kind of like the actor Javier Cámara, but with a big ridge of bone missing from his skull about two inches above his brow line. According to David, the nephew used to be a fireman for the Mancomunidad until a car accidetn laid him low for a couple of months; now he spends most of his time caring for his dowager aunt, who is about seventy and has bone cancer. The aunt is not in good shape, and having to travel to Córdoba for radiotherapy every day for thirty-five days straight is not doing her any good – especially because she’s spent almost all her life in the pueblo and the lack of having moved anywhere by vehicular transit has made her unfortunately prone to car sickness. Which she was, several times in the car before we even hit the highway. But the two men were cool with it – I guess it’s a fairly common occurence – and they came prepared. (The truth of it is, I don’t actually know if she was being sick or not – she just kept making this sound like a frog croaking in a closed jam jar and I tried to think about it as little as possible.)

I love travelling through that area, but I can’t think of many other places, even within Andalucía, where the phrase “an area hobbled by poverty” is as apt. They’re not just poor; in a lot of places there, they don’t even want to give a face to how poor they are because just exposing themselves to outsiders would be a source of shame. It definitely fits the description of being “heartbreakingly beautiful”, and one interesting thing about it is that forest fires aren’t a problem in the area there’s no real one-upmanship to be gained by burning anything. (The area’s sparse population is also a benefit – if any suspicious behaviour took place there, half the residents would know who did it before the fire took hold. Like the old Canadian joke: “Could you identify the bank robber in a police lineup?” “Yeah! It were Joe Jones, from the fifth concession – I recognized him by the cigarette burns in his jacket!”)

The conference itself wasn’t a terribly formal affair – some 25 people, with the odd local senior citizen shuffling in and out, the organizers returning late after lunch, and I had to cut my presentation about ten minutes short. Which wasn’t such a big deal, though I do feel funny that they paid me €300 for 30 minutes of work. It’s almost not fair. But at the same time, it seems like the Mancomunidad has money to throw around: when I checked into the hotel and didn’t know if dinner was included in the deal, the Scottish receptionist said she’d check into it. I said that I didn’t want to rack up expenses for them more than I had to. She just kind of raised an eyebrow in a way that told me that that wasn’t that much of an issue.

I didn’t get to see Priego itself, which was a shame. I really would have liked to have taken a tour of the town, but that’s going to have to wait for next time, it seems...

So it's now 2:15 PM and I'm writing this on the AVE back to the capital. I'm gonna shut this down and write more when I get back to Madrid. I’m tired; I didn’t sleep well and I don’t know if it’s because of the combination of roast lamb for dinner and a gin and tonic in the bath after (note to self: G&Ts do NOT mix well with lamb), the onset of That Time of the Month or how quiet it was. But I woke up about four times during the night, just couldn’t get my eyes to stick as they say in Spanish, and I kept thinking, Damn, it’s sooooo quiet here.... I wonder if I could actually sleep or live happily in a place that’s THAT isolated. Nice biking, but what about the living in a place like that?

Freedom!

So we had the talk today. We had the talk and I told her that I was terribly sorry, but I couldn't continue with directing the bike club as it was going now. That things were a LOT different from what I thought it was going to be. I suppose that I could have just told The Owner that all I wanted to do was leave, but I thought it would be better to at least give some kind of explanation for why I was going.

But you know what I can't shake off? I can't shake the feeling that I was being tested.

I can't shake the feeling that somehow, she wanted it to fail so that it would be another arrow in her persona Saint Sebastian of how she'd tried to save the final bastion of road cycling in Spain, and how another person had let her down...

I can't. I'd like to give her the benefit of the doubt on this one, but I can't.

Oh, well....

In a little over two weeks from now, it ceases to be my problem.