October 6, 2004 to October 10, 2004
Days 22-26:Baeza to Madrid
The written journal ended at Montefrio, and the remembered journal ended at Baeza - at least the published part of it. It also contained a single unpublished page to cover the remaining five days of the tour, from Baeza to Madrid and our flight home. I never wrote anything about those days though, and the only contents of the page were a pathetically few photographs.
Let’s go back and fill in the blanks as best as we can though, to give at least a general sense of where the time went. First, it began with a few more miles on the bike, as we advanced to Ubeda to pick up the vehicle we had rented to drive ourselves from there to Madrid. For the sake of completeness we might as well include them here.
For the day: 7 miles, 500’; for the tour: 328 miles, 49,500’
My memory of the rest of rhese five days is a real mix, filled mostly with total blanks punctuated by a few specific strong memories I doubt I’ll ever forget. So take everything here with a grain of salt.
And view it as an educated guess based on very few data points. This section begins with us picking up our rental vehicle in Ubeda, a booking we presumably made in our two night stay at the parador above Jaen. The narrative from Jaen only addresses our attempt to file a police report and hope that our pannier had been discovered and turned in to the police, but presumably this is where all the planning for abruptly changing our itinerary occurred: cancelling hotreservations, renting a vehicle for the drive to Madrid, and changing the booking for our return flight, which I now believe was planned to be from Malaga.
As I recall it, we picked up the car in the morning and drove it to Madrid on the same day, staying at a suburb somewhere east of the airport. Torrejon de Ardoz looks about right on the map and sounds familiar, so let’s assume it was there. Along the way we made only one tourism stop: to see the famous Baños Castle rising above Baños de la Encina, in the province of Jaén. Since it’s our big tourism stop of the day, let’s include a description of the place, from the Andalucia tourism website:
It is an Umayyad fortress, built in the 10th century and situated on a small hill in the town. It is flanked by a robust, crenellated wall with fourteen towers, plus one, the fifteenth, denominated the "Torre Cristiana del Homenaje". The castle, has suffered very little damage. It is, therefore, the best preserved fortified complex from the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba, whilst remaining, at the same time, one of the best preserved Muslim castles in Spain. Its incalculable historic and artistic value, is the reason why this castle came to be classified as a National Monument 1931 and a Historic-Artistic Site in 1969.
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The next morning (Thursday, October 7th) we drove into central Madrid to the American embassy. And let’s pause here to remember that this was twenty years ago, before the GPS or other modern navigation devices had been invented; so presumably we found our way there with the use of a city map we picked up from our hotel perhaps, with me driving and Rachael navigating. And let’s also remember that Madrid is a huge, sprawling mess , and we were driving in the morning sometime, probably during rush hour. I still remember the drive into and out of Madrid as the most stressful and frightening urban driving experience of my life.
We somehow survived the drive and made it to the embassy, where we sat for probably half the day, finally coming away with the temporary passports that would permit us to leave the country. I think I still have those passports and just saw them in rummaging through storage, but didn’t think to photocopy them to include here. Maybe I’ll go back and find them in Merch and add them then.
I believe we just started driving south to Toledo after we left Madrid, possibly through the famous Aranjuez; although several other routes are possible. I don’t really recall anything from that drive other than the horror of driving through central Madrid again and that part way to Toledo I became violently ill and had a hard time completing the drive.
And I still recall my astonishment and the admiration I felt for the garage attendant who drove our huge, hulking vehicle down through his very cramped underground garage and parked it in one of its very narrow spaces marked out for much smaller vehicles. The man definitely knew his garage and his cars.
And then I remember pretty much nothing until time came to drive back to Madrid for our flight home. Rachael took a break on at least one occasion to take a walk through the historical center which began just behind our hotel; and I got out for a shaky, short walk toward the end of our stay and came away with exactly one photo.
I still have regrets about how this tour ended of course, but one of them is that Toledo, Ubeda and Baeza are all cities I’d long wanted to see and we missed our chances on all three. We should think about that, study the train maps, and consider whether there isn’t a short regional tour of these places we might tackle someday.
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And then we drove back to rhe Madrid airport Sunday morning. I was thinking that we stayed in Toledo for two nights, but that leaves us with a one day gap so it must have been three.
And I remember that this entire early morning drive was difficult because I was still in recovery, and because Madrid. And then we flew home after presumably boxing the bikes at the airport, arrived in Portland in the evening and got back to our Pearl District condo on the MAX and then made the hour-long drive down to Salem to return to the office the next morning. Because that’s just how w e did it in those days. Why spend our first day back getting over jet lag sitting around our home when that was another day we could have spent on tour? We’jj get over jet lag in the office, was our thinking in those days.
Today's ride: 8 miles (13 km)
Total: 505 miles (813 km)
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1978 we drove from Germany to see Spain. Went through Madrid at rush hour and the central roundabout half a dozen or more lanes wide was a terrible mess, bumper to bumper going faster than we could navigate and seemingly endless numbers of streets! We missed our turnoff and had to do another spin around the confusion before we found it.
----- Never again! -----
3 days ago