To Alameda: Calima

April 6, 2024

With an eighty degree day and full sun in the forecast, we elected to get an earlier start than usual. We’re down to the self-serve cafeteria at just past six, with me filling up on my ham and cheese croissant and half of Rachael’s who supplemented her half portion with yogurt. We make it out the door and shuttling the bikes and panniers down the two elevators before nine, for one of our earliest starts I can recall.

On the way downstairs, Rachael takes the panniers down in the rightmost elevator, and is surprised to find herself in the basement. I forgot to warn her of this, because it happened to me yesterday when I went down for an evening snack. It explains what happened to me yesterday - it looks like the right elevator is programmed to always go to the basement first for some reason, no matter what you have requested. Another interesting first.

It was something of a shock when we wheel the bikes outside and see a pallid, totally overcast sky rather than the sunny day we’d expected. And it looks abnormal, not really quite overcast. Later I’ll read up on this and learn my new Spanish word for the day: calima, or haze. Today we have the weather conditions that result in the sky darkened from dust blowing across the Mediterranean from the Sahara Desert. This happens here from time to time, but it’s the first time I can remember us experiencing it. The condition will persist through the entire day.

Last night we studied together a pair of alternative routes for the day. They’re identical except for the first mile or two. One, the one I originally mapped out and we have loaded on the Garmins, leaves here by staying on the unpaved service road for a mile before merging back onto pavement again. The other drops down into town and then climbs out again, staying on the pavement at the expense of adding a mile to the ride plus a bit more climbing as the tradeoff for avoiding a mile of dirt and rocks.

A tough choice, but what sells us on the service road is recalling the horrendous traffic in town on our way in yesterday. Neither of us wants to revisit town because of this, so we stick with the high route.

A mile and a series of expletives later, after this miserable disservice road serves us up a series of steep, rocky grades too steep to bike safely either up or down, we’re still not sure we made the right decision. It could have been horrible in town too, for all we know.

Bad enough that we have to walk down as well a up.

At least the surroundings are attractive as we push our bikes up and down the ‘road’. Does this help our attitudes, experiencing this beauty as we trudge along? Not as much as you might think.

Miserable roads are like Tolstoy’s unhappy families. Each is miserable in its own way.

Finally we come to the end and merge back onto pavement again.

That tasty appetizer dispensed with, we move on to what we expect will be the main course today - the four mile climb that begins after we first cross under the A92 and drop to the valley floor for the next two miles, eventually bottoming out when we cross the Rio Frio. The climb that follows doesn’t look bad - a roughly 900’ climb with a 4.5% average grade, but it’s heavily front-loaded with most of the work coming in the first two miles, with most of this stretch in the 6-10% band. It makes us glad we’re taking this first thing in the morning before the sun breaks out and the day heats up, which we still expect to happen.

Dropping toward Riofrio and into a sea of olive trees, the dominant landscape for the day.

Somehow I failed to capture any photos of the climb. Maybe I just wanted to get it over and done with, or was uninspired by the dreary sky? Fortunately Rachael pulled something out of her GoPro for us to look at here.

Once over the top, we have a reasonably level stretch for the next ten miles, beginning with the part I’ve been wondering about: the 1.8 unpaved miles RideWithGPS warned us about, another stretch of service road alongside the A-92. The first half of it isn’t bad at all, with enough broken fragments of remaining pavement that you can almost bridge them much of the time.

The second half is quite different though, and so overgrown that it’s hard to imagine it ever really functioned as a service road, except for the fact that it’s got an impressively large but long abandoned structure at its crown. At its worst it narrows down to a slender track almost totally overgrown by encroaching vegetation. We’d have been worried that it would eventually fail completely, which would really leave us in a jam because the only bikeable alternative would add about ten miles to the day, if it weren’t for the fact that we see two other bikers coming our way. Assuming they haven’t just turned back themselves and are keeping that grim information to themselves, we should be able to get through.

Oh, good. It looks like we’ll be getting through after all.

I’m not surprised it’s abandoned. We wouldn’t want to live here either.

Not so bad, really. Its nice that it’s just dirt instead of rocky.

After that, just as RideWithGPS promised us, we’re back on pavement for the duration. It’s a good quality road, if you don’t count the rough surfaces we encounter dropping through Archidona, the only place approaching the size of a town we’ll see all day. It’s a pretty confusing ride as we drop steeply through it, somehow finding ourselves biking the wrong way down a narrow one way steeet over and over again.

I stopped for this shot partly to show the town, but mostly to show the sky. There are hills out there, just a couple of miles away. I think you can just make out the outline of La Pena de Los Enamorados on the left, if you look closely enough.

I’d been looking forward to biking through Archidona as one of the high points of the whole ride from Archidona to Seville, because it’s only a few miles from a striking monolith just a few miles to the west, La Pena del Los Enamorados. We passed beneath it on our way from Antequera to Seville via the much better route through Alhama de Grenada a decade ago.

And I can see it as we descend through town - but very faintly with its outline just barely visible through the haze that’s so dense that visibility is cut down to just a few miles.

Here’s the La Pena de Los Enamorados I was hoping to see again. This is what it looked like when we passed beneath it a decade ago.

Finally, there’s the one last two mile climb in our path before the final ten mile drop and glide to our hotel on the outskirts of Alameda. It’s not a bad two mile climb, no worse than 5-6%, but it’s easier than that today because after leaving Archidona we turn northwest and pick up a pure, strong tailwind that blasts us all the way home. It must be 20-25 mph, strong enough that we can hear it moan above the rustling of the olive trees. It helps lift us up the climb, and for the rest of the way it blows us up low rollers, our momentum and the wind pushing us up the low rises so we don’t really need to turn the crank at all to surmount them. It’s strong enough that we have to stop a couple of times to give our hands a rest from continuously braking to keep our speed down.

The final few miles have an almost eerie quality as we drop through an endless sea of olives, a continuous monocrop without a noticeable gap for maybe three or four miles. Today it has a surreal quality, the grayish-green trees blending into the whitish gray haze.

On the climb, pushed up by a 20+ mph booster. We don’t mind.

Over the hump, it’s all down and out from here.

An unbroken ocean of olives that persists for several miles.

Video sound track: Jarabi, by Yasmin Williams

When we come to our rural hotel, we’re surprised to see a sign out advertising a menu of the day. Surprising, because we couldn’t even tell from the listing if their restaurant existed or was in service. I go inside to confirm we can get a meal, and once we know we scrap our plans for a restaurant another half mile on and wheel our bikes inside.

It’s a huge place - apparently we’re in a former duke’s home, from the name of it. And it’s a little confusing at first. There’s a very large but empty banquet hall, with white tablecloths out and places set. We’re directed away from there though to the small bar, where we’re the first ones there: it’s precisely 1:30, and they’re just opening for lunch.

Ten minutes later it’s a busy scene as first a few other diners join us and then the space is invaded by ten or so motorcyclists who shuttle in and out the door carrying beers to their table outside. When the door opens there’s a huge blast of that 20 mph wind blowing in, and half the time the beer toters don’t close it behind them.

Our room up on the first floor is tiny, poorly lit, and a trap because we’re under the rafters. I do well though and it only takes two cracks on my thick skull before the point gets across.

One thing that frustrates me at first is that it looks like we’ll be holed up all afternoon with no WiFi. Our phones don’t have sufficient signal for the hotspot to work, and the password we’ve been shown is seemingly incorrect. Eventually I go down to the bar to ask for it again, and she points to it posted on the wall. Oh, it’s posadatempranillo, not posadatemprenillo. I’ve apparently been misspelling that wine for a long time.

While we’re eating, other folks start arriving dressed in finery. They straggle in for at least a half hour or more, maybe a hundred of them or more. It’s a wedding, or a milestone birthday or something, and the celebration continues noisily all afternoon and into the night. Kids are playing indoors and outside on the patio, there’s music and dancing, there are even firecrackers at one point.

The walls are thin here so it’s loud in our room. We resign ourselves to a long, sleepless night, but then at precisely 10:00 it all stops. Lights out, like the switch got flipped off. Amazing.

And the sky never did clear today. Hopefully tomorrow, but we’ll see.

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Today's ride: 33 miles (53 km)
Total: 697 miles (1,122 km)

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Bob KoreisSounds like you are able to maintain a sense of humor re the service roads. The comments were definitely LOL but I've felt your pain. In the video I was able to catch a glimpse of a flag indicating wind speed and direction when you passed through Archidona.
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1 month ago

Rich FrasierWe're having that grey haze here, too. Makes for a really uninspiring day, for sure. I rode in the garage today. :)
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1 month ago

Scott AndersonTo Bob KoreisIt was really pretty funny, if you can keep that attitude. Not the haze though. We’ll both be really glad when it clears up.
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1 month ago

Jacquie GaudetNo map today? We all want to know which "roads" to avoid!
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1 month ago

Scott AndersonTo Jacquie GaudetOh! Thanks for the prompt.
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1 month ago

Rachael AndersonTo Rich FrasierWow, you’re being affected by it also. It’s really awful and not good if
You have breathing issues. It got a little better yesterday.
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1 month ago

Rachael AndersonThanks for pointing that out. We definitely want others to avoid what we had to go through!
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1 month ago