Day 6 — Monday 2 May 2011

Moron de la Frontera – Alcolea del Rio

I had desayuno in the bar and recovered my passport. A chap in the bar produced a tourist map of Moron and I used that to find my way out of town, and steadily down hill for about 10 miles to Arahal and then across a 15 mile pancake flat plain until I hit Carmona at the top of its ridge. Ooff! At the top was an impregnable walled city swarming with smart cars and trendy people. I wheeled my bicycle through an enormous medieval double gate and was immediately beckoned into a restaurant by a waiter with an impressive way of flourishing cutlery. €10 for a really filling meal and use of the facilities. I just caught the tourist office before it closed and got a free street map that enabled me to get out of the city without trouble.

I now headed downhill to the valley of the Rio Guadalquivir that flows through Seville. Crossing the river and up to the A436 at Alcolea del Rio I needed a bit of help to find Villanueva del Rio where I had identified a hostal before I left England. Much arm waving with a chap in the street and pointing to my map on which typically he couldn’t identify where we were resulted in him suddenly pointing across the road to a motel, saying in effect, “What are you bothering about, stay there!”

So over I went and was welcomed into a trucking motel that sucked my bicycle into its restaurant to lean against a wall and me to a comfortable room with en suite facilities. I went down to the bar and had a couple of beers as I sent a text message to Liz and wrote up my diary.

I began to ponder my lonely state, and think about a book I had read a year ago on a visit to the ten-yearly passion play at Oberammergau, The Cloud of Unknowing, attributed to an unidentified country parson from the East Midlands writing in the late fourteenth century. He talks about the need for personal contemplation without interference from other distractions. I linked that to the TV series featuring an English parish priest who travelled to India and China following the disciplines of monks in various traditions. In the end he did not find a solitary hermit’s condition one which attracted him, and I rather agreed with him. But the experience is probably valuable, at least for a while. To get home having faced a challenge, not foolishly beyond my capabilities, enjoyable when all is going well, overcoming difficulties with ingenuity and inventiveness, not to have given up in the face of difficulties, is something to look back on with quiet satisfaction. The solitude brings home the absolute value and safety of community, the need for regular contact with friends, and the need for close personal relationships. But enough of that …

The route I had chosen to follow through Spain had been suggested by a book of Spanish cycle tours by Harry Dowdell, published by Cicerone, and I had linked a number of his routes together. I had already taken in the Western edge of a route round the Sierra de Grazalema, where the road from Ubrique to Algodonales forms part of that route, and I was now about to touch on another route around the Sierra Morena, using the road from Constantina through Alanis to Argallon, before the route in the book sweeps East to Cordoba.

Having thought through the following day’s route I turned in.