Lovely Alternatives

Friday, 12 October 2007: Guadalajara to Brihuega, 45 km
Sometimes, when your nightmares come true, it seems to make them go away for the future. I know that missing a train hardly qualifies as a nightmare, but when I was standing on Platform 15 of Chamartín Station, watching the train to the town to Arcos de Jalón pull away, I couldn't think of anything else. Announcements had told us that the train was leaving from Platform 5. My Spanish is good enough that I would NOT confuse those two numbers. And even though we ran like a pair of maniacs, we missed the train.

The first exploration trip to check out the Trans-Iberian route was not getting off to a good start!

In the end, it worked out well. Not only because we missed having to do a lot of highway riding, but because we found a great way of getting around the Alcarria region. The idea behind the Trans-Iberian is to find quiet roads that allow cyclists to travel around Spain, and we found a number of good options that would make a fun cycling weekend around Madrid.

After filling ourselves with coffee, we rode off and followed the CM101 highway up to the turnoff to Tórtola de Henares, a small bedroom community northeast of Guadalajara city. It seems to have a charming centre, but it's hard to tell, what with all the new construction creeping up the sides of the hills around town. We then headed north on the CM1003 regional road - and did well for the first 500 metres - until the highway ran out! The regional government was a third of the way through rebuilding the road, which left us with five or six kilometres of rough gravel riding. Nothing unusual, for having grown up in Eastern Ontario, but it still wasn't pleasant. Gonzalo, our resident public works expert, didn't think much of the road.

The next, best option was to head through the towns of Ciruelas and Cañizar, where we stopped for lunch. It seems like most small towns in Guadalajara province that have more than a couple of hundred residents have, at least, two important monuments: a bar and a church. That's how we came up with our first rule: When in doubt, we'll meet at the first bar or the church, whichever one we come across first. After a quick lunch (including a delicious salad of tomatoes, garlic, cumin seeds and thyme), we set off, did a quick climb up out of the Henares Valley, and set off towards Brihuega.

Brihuega itself is a cute little town, very green and historic, but one thing became very clear very quickly: They're definitely not used to cycle tourists in this part of the country. The clerk at the hostal where we stayed gladly took our money and booked us in - and two minutes later, the owner of the place came out and started whining that no one had told him that we would be bringing bicycles.

I calmly pointed out that, when I'd booked the room the night before, I had told the clerk on duty that we would be arriving by bicycle, so it wasn't like they weren't informed. He grudgingly accepted the bicycles and told us to put them in the salon, but not before he complained that the other guests would have to look at the bicycles. (Later, I took a look at the cubby holes where the keys were kept - only four of the thirty rooms were occupied!)

We didn't last very long that night. We had a couple of glasses of wine, some platos combinados of fried eggs, chips and grilled red peppers, and were in bed before ten o'clock - a good thing, considering that Saturday promised to be a very long day, indeed.