Day 17 — Saturday 14 May 2011

Segovia – Cantalejo

In the morning I had breakfast of bread and cheese and bumped into two English couples, one from Bishop Auckland who enjoyed tandem cycling and the other who had just retired and the husband talked to me about Raleigh frames and Brooks saddles. These were the first English people I had seen for a week.

This day I would go over the 1,000 kilometre mark and it was the 17th day of cycling. I felt quite good about being about two thirds of the way through Spain.

I peddled back down the road into the centre of Segovia using the street map the information office had given me and wound my way round the valley that acts as a defensive moat to the northern side of the city. Looking up there was the Alcázar de Segovia on the other side of the river and as I prepared to turn North for Zamarramala I came across a noisy bar, so I stopped for an excellent desayuno, with lots of interesting but unidentifiable tapas. I sat for half an hour and ate my fill before setting out again. A chap on a road bike out for a ride stopped to tell me what a great place it was and that I was going in the wrong direction. Well, they all do don’t they? I pressed on regardless.

There was level cycling initially on small roads but as I approached the A-601 (Autovia de Segovia-Valladolid) I began to look for a way across. I’ve since discovered a small road that isn’t actually on the Michelin map; it does a wiggle at a roundabout and hops over the main road on a bridge as neat as you like. However, as it was I blithely cycled onto the autovia on a broad hard shoulder and rode down it for about a kilometre before taking the CL-603 for Cantalejo. I found a good lunch but in the afternoon the sky clouded over and it began to look like rain.

At Cantalejo I asked in a bar and was directed towards the camp site about a kilometre to the East of the town, with an excellent toilet block but with few people. The bar actually opened in the evening and I had pizza with some beers and wrote up my diary. I pitched my tent next to a particularly green bit of grass and locked my bicycle to a lamp post, and during the night I heard a repeating hissing sound that I couldn’t identify accompanied by a spattering of water. That was strange as the sun had come out again in the evening and as I turned in there were stars in the sky. I poked my head out of my tent in the early hours and realised that I had pitched my tent next to a grass sprinkler that operated at night and was soaking my bicycle. I timed my run carefully between circuits of the sprinkler, unlocked and moved my bicycle to a dryer lamp post. In the morning I also moved my tent out of range of the sprinkler.

I had the day off on Sunday and found the church in the centre of town. It was locked so I sat down in the sun and contemplated life. The notice on the church door said the service was to be at, I think, eleven o’clock and several people were standing around complaining that the church was not open. A chap came over and said he was going to ask the priest what was going on and he returned a little later saying that the church would be open at one o’clock. I went to find some postcards and wrote them. Sure enough the church eventually opened and it became quite full. After the service there was was a procession to the outskirts of the town following a statue carried by some of the congregation. I hadn’t any idea what was actually going on but it was very colourful with lots of banging on drums. I abandoned the procession and went off to find a good lunch in a bar and strolled back to the campsite via a post office where I sent off the post cards to Liz.

Opposite the campsite there was a recreation area with a swimming pool (closed) and a football stadium. Behind those were conventional tennis courts and another court with side and front walls about 12 feet high in which a group of people were playing a racket game that I had never seen before, but which I have since discovered is Basque pelota. From the town to the recreation area there was an attractive brick paved pedestrian promenade along which families and couples sauntered in the shade of pine trees.