October 22, 2013
Aliseda
Blown out of Portugal, sucked into Spain
We fretted a lot last night, considering our options if biking 60 miles in a hard rain looked out of the question: Plan B: cancel our reservation, and wait out the storm; Plan C: bike to Valencia and try to catch a bus or taxi; Plan D: somehow get to a place where we could rent a car for a few days and see Extramadura a different way. All sounded like bad choices to us, so we tried Plan E instead: think good thoughts and pray to the weather gods.
It worked! Along about 3AM the howling winds died down a bit; and when we went down for breakfast Marvao was enveloped in a dense fog, but it wasn't raining. We hustled through breakfast, packed up, and hit the road quickly, hoping to get as many miles in as we could before the roof fell in.
The roof never fell. Dense, ugly cloud formations rose up around us in all directions, but we remained in a dry patch that followed us all the way to our day's end at Aliseda; and as the day progressed conditions steadily improved so that we even enjoyed brief glimpses of sun at the end. So, for us the storm ended up as a big nothing - other than it gave us a 15 mph tailwind that left us with our best average speed of the trip.
One casualty of the weather situation was our day's itinerary. The original plan was to follow a longer and quieter route to the south through La Cordosera and Alburquerque (yes, that's the correct spelling for Spain's version), but we ended up taking the fastest path to shelter and stayed on the N542 instead. We mostly kept our heads down and on task so we didn't look around much; but from what we could see Extramadura looks lovely and should be a great place to spend then next 5 days.
In one memorable movement, I saw a pair of huge black birds circling in the distance. As I was wondering whether they were eagles or an unfamiliar vulture, a few more took flight from the field; and then a slow procession ensued, with over 50 of these massive birds circling above.
Aliseda itself though is probably on few lists as a tourism destination. We are here only because it is close enough to Caceres so that we can spend most of tomorrow exploring it, and because biking all the way to Caceres in one day (75 miles from Marvao) sounded like a longer day than we wanted to commit to. Score one for the types who like to leave their agenda open and more flexible than we do - as it turned out, I would have been happy to have kept going today and spend two nights in Caceres instead.
Elevation log: 2700' today, 22,400' total.
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Today's ride: 55 miles (89 km)
Total: 488 miles (785 km)
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