The alarm woke me this morning. I packed up and started riding. Getting out of Seville was going pretty well along the bike paths. I find in a unfamiliar city the paths are sometimes hard to follow. Some of the dips and doodles around things lose me. The final bridge lost me and I followed a better looking path to get over a big knot of freeways. It put me in some high tech industrial park that seemed to have no way out. I did a lot of map checking to get back on the main road.
I was then out of Seville and going through suburbs, then suburbs with industry. I stopped for some morning coffee as I'd had none yet. The bar I picked serviced the local workers from the various factories up and down the road. The guys were grabbing breakfast and coffee. In a lot of the bars the barkeeper will line up a bunch of plates with a packet of sugar and a spoon. When someone orders a coffee the coffee goes on the plate and the plate is pushed forward. Effeciency ... It must save a millisecond per coffee. It does look nice.
When I went to pay for my coffees, one of the local workers was paying for his and he ordered a glass of water and a 1.5L bottle of water. It looked like a good idea so I copied him.
After another 5km riding past one factory after another, I was in farmland. The route I was on had almost no traffic but my route planner wanted me to ride on the gravel road 2m beside the nice paved road. I stuck to the pavement. I did see a number of local gravel riders using it.
At the first non-suburb town - Los Palacios y Villafranca - I was at the half way point and getting a little hungry. I picked a bar and sat down. The waiter explained they only had tapas at this time and then only the first two sections and not the patatas. Basically, the cooked food was not being done yet. I got a sandwich and a few other things; one was some thin sliced dried meat thing - chicharron de Cadiz - I haven't had before and it was really good.
The rest of the day I just kept riding. I was thinking back to other trips and how I rode much further distances. Then I remembered how I did that: pain tolerance.
Jerez is an interesting small city. It has some old stuff. The bicycle paths are a little odd. They don't seem well used and not all that well designed. I would have been smacked by a car where the path just crossed a road at ta blind corner but I heard it coming. The car blew through the bike crossing and I'm pretty sure I had the right of way.
My hotel is great, Hotel Dona Blanca, great price, nice room, helpful front desk and breakfast in the morning.
After cleaning up I walked to the main square and had two beers while I planned my next two days and made some hotel bookings. Tomorrow I will go to the base of the big climbs and then go over the top to Ronda the next day.
For dinner I didn't pick the greatest place, the food was so-so, BUT, there was a ton of it and it was cheap. I left so much behind, I am so stuffed and the bill was 30€. The waiter stopped me ordering when I got to 5 items. 3 would have been too much. Now I need to be unconscious.
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