The Spanish word "dime" is pronounced "deemay", and it means "tell me". But as we think we heard it in Spain, it's how you answer the phone. What's more when our daughter was teaching Spanish, Dime was the title of one of the text books she used, so we associate that with learning Spanish.

But why is Spanish or learning more Spanish suddenly on our radar? Probably it is just that a fact long known to hoards of Brits has filtered through to us: Southern Spain is fairly warm in winter. According to NOAA, low temperatures in January, February, and March are about 8 or 9 degrees. That's below our comfort range, alright, but at the same time daily highs reach 17 to 19, which we would call almost ideal. And then there is the fact known to hoards of Canadian "snow birds", low temperatures in Yucatan, Mexico in winter are 19 and 20, and highs are approaching 30. That's hot!

It means that for people looking to cycle happily in Winter, while staying in the Northern hemisphere and not going to Asia or Africa (or America), the Spanish have a pretty good lock on the locations (unless they are Portuguese!).

This is what lies behind our plan to return to Valencia in February, and to continue around southern Spain (and then Portugal), before rather unwisely shooting north in April. 

But this is  December, and February is "months" away, so what to do? Jump on a plane to Yucatan, of course. We like the relatively quiet roads of Yucatan. These are found in most places there, except  not on the east side "Mayan Riviera".  Even though we have to land at Cancun, on the east side, we can escape west quite rapidly.

This time, Dodie suggested that we could go somewhere and take Spanish classes, perhaps half days, while cycling around for half days.  At first I liked the idea, but now I suspect that I am too old to learn a language effectively. We'll see what we may find, but at least we'll try to dive in and speak to people in Spanish as much as possible. 

If the half day idea is discarded, then we are going to do our usual crazy mad rushes from A to B. See the Route page, coming soon, to see what that means this time.

That Spanish teacher daughter already prepared a long list of phrases of use to cyclists. Let's begin with that by learning: "Estamos escribiendo un blog sobre nuestros viajes en bicicleta".   (We are writing a blog about our bike trips.)!

Here we go!