Yes I didn't shower this morning.

September 28, 2011

The nights are definitely getting colder. I was awakened early shivering and folded my arms around my chest instinctively to keep warm. The nights are longer too as Autumn advances. At half six while stood outside the tent answering nature it was still a starry night without a glimmer of light from the coming day. Back in the tent, which metaphorically is the womb, I huddle in in my sleeping bag keeping warm. I remain waiting until light before moving again. I ate half a kilo of grapes and drank a cup of tea which is as good a breakfast as I've had, then set about packing and taking down and packing away the condensation soaked tent.

It's cold riding in the long shadows cast by hills to the east of the road. I've got on winter-gloves, a warm fleece and rain-jacket. In time the shadows shorten and the sun's rays and warmth reach me, so before long I stop and take off the gloves, rain-jacket and fleece.

One possible pro with approaching a town in France was, the whereabouts of those supermarche chains-SuperU and Carrefour, were posted on billboards and next to always either or both chains had a store on the edge of town. It is completely different in Spain. While I can be a lot freer in what I put in the shopping-basket and know that the lot won't come till some exorbitant sum, it's finding a supermercado first, as I now experience half an hour detouring through streets appearing lose while looking for a supermercado.

Reaching Requena at a timely eleven o'clock, I thought, do I turn for el centro, or do I follow signs for the next place south. I chose the later in the hope there just maybe what I'm looking for that way. There wasn't any such thing and it was just by chance at a roundabout, while riding back towards town, that I saw a Lidl supermercado sign at the roadside a few hundred metres in along a side-street.

In the check-out queue, I'm reminded of not having washed in what, I think most be a week now, by the gaze and body-language of people next me. I need to stop to wash clothes too: all that I'm wearing is well saturated in sweat. My hair and beard are dirty and unkempt.

Leaving Requena, I had a choice of two roads, south to a place called Alllaiman, or south west to Albacet. At the roundabout I chose the first named place: don't know why. I think the road looked better on the map; perhaps because, onwards from Allaiman it is but a day's ride to the city of Murcia where I think I'd like to stop a day to get clean.

It was a pleasant road all the same with dwarf pine plantations on either side and I easily found a shaded grove to lunch in. The afternoon saw me reach and drop down into a great depression to a riverside town called Cofrentes, dominated by the cooling towers of a power-station. Again, the road was elevated across the valley on a viaduct from which, I stopped and viewed a castle on a rocky promontory by a curve in the slow snaking river below, and the usual town with it's bell-tower further along the riverbank.

Riding on, it was a long graduated climb up again on a newly-built road with plenty of remaining old road curving-around and behind cuttings at the side. And as it was after four o'clock now, I looked for and found a place to camp up a lane-way from a section of the old road.

As a good bottle of wine costs as little as one Euro twenty-five in Spain, I've created a makeshift wine glass from a plastic water bottle.

Castle and town as seen from the viaduct.

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