Day forty two

 

Room with a sea view and a neat balcony.

I miss breakfast and leave the hostal in Lorca at 8:30. The evening before I had eaten a prawn curry from a Chinese take-away, so felt no need for breakfast. Just after midday I am on the coast again after an exhilarating ride through the early morning Lorca rush-hour traffic. The start was quite chilly, maybe because of Lorca's altitude and there had also been storms during the night. After that it warmed up slowly and the ride was mostly downhill to the coast. I stopped at a cafe around 11:00 for a cafe con leche and toasted croissant. By 15:00 I had covered 66km and decided on an early stop as I was beginning to reach hills again where places to stay become difficult to find and my energy levels are mostly depleted. This completes the 2nd third of my journey to Almeria from Murcia. By tomorrow evening the worst of the mountains should be behind me and you could say I will be on the home straight, except it will be anything but straight.

I find a 3-star hotel on the seafront with breakfast included for 1 euro more than last night's hostal. However this room has a double bed, bath, bidet, balcony with sea view, fridge and loads of space. Also the people are much friendlier. I got the impression that the hostal owners in Lorca were paranoid about Covid as I had to hand over the keys, plastic wrapped TV remote and A/C remote through a letterbox as the guy would not touch them when I offered them to him through a plastic screen. Maybe they'd had bad experiences. They had also kept my passport overnight. which has never happened before. That said Lorca by night looked like a lively place with lots of small open-late supermercados, bars and restaurants.

A lovely bridge I passed on the way down to the coast. I'm not sure if it was new or was an old bridge that was being renovated.

Some of you who have followed my journey may wonder what happened to Granada. It had been my intended route from the beginning but the GPS app., altitudes quoted were between 1500m and 1600m. After La Vall de Gallinera to Alicante was quoted at 850m and that almost finished me off I had no desire to attempt anything higher. In fact I had no desire to climb 850m again. How these figures are calculated is all a bit vague as La Vall de Gallinera altitude is only around 300m. I suppose it must be based on the culmination of every up and down.

Anyway I decided to plan each step daily and on reaching Alicante instead of traveling inland on a shorter route to Granada I chose to carry on to Murcia. In Murcia an enthusiastic young Spaniard stopped me in a pedestrian zone and wanted to know about my journey. He was eager to do bike camping himself, had taught English in China and been a skidoo tourist guide in Finland. He advised me to go to the coast via Purias. Now he pronounced it 'surias' so I had to guess that he meant Purias, as it was the only place with a similar sounding name. Anyway I have that guy to thank for making my journey that little bit more enjoyable and possibly making finishing it possible.