Staying in an apartment should have made an early start easier but despite rising at 07:15, it was almost ten by the time we’d had our breakfast of cereal and scrambled egg, made our sandwiches, washed up, retrieved our bikes from the garage and locked the apartment. We somehow took a wrong turn when leaving the city, our devices being hard to read in the bright sun. We stopped to check our location but couldn’t get a GPS signal so it took a while to get back on track.
When we did, the via verde was initially along a smooth paved surface enabling rapid progress but soon ended and we were back on slow bumpy gravel. No clouds again, temperature pleasant until mid day. We stopped for lunch at a shady bench but were driven away by flies before we started.
We spotted that a road ran almost parallel so switched to that for a while, allowing increased speed. Back on the via verde the surface was worse, larger gravel pieces with a narrow channel of smaller lumps, bumpy and requiring concentration. We were glad to turn off on a minor road leading to the N234 which took us to today’s destination.
We had to phone for admittance, and were shown to the garage to store our bikes, then to our room and left to ourselves. There was another bar in the village so we tried that in hope of getting a drink. An old woman was sitting outside in the shade and explained that the bar owner was sleeping and would open later. It was 18:00 by now but still hot.
Later we went for another walk round, locals were sitting out and we had a drink too before returning for dinner at our hostal. A mediocre meal, outside of the cities, the Spanish have no idea of vegetarian cooking, but the apple tart was better. Few of the village houses had lights on and no traffic was circulating, rural depopulation perhaps.