One of the highlights of the tour so far has to be year magnificent descent from Salamanca into Extremadura. It was long and fast and full of breathtakingly sweeping curves. Above a certain speed bikes start to shake and a touch on the brakes might be required. With a normal machine that has been properly set up this might be somewhere between 70 and 90 kph. In the case of the Goatmobile this shaking phenomenon seems to kick in at around half that speed. I was behind the Goat for some of the descent and I’m sure some of the debris that whistled past me came from his machine and this might have included his helmet which at some point has fallen off the back of his bike.
This morning’s ride from Merida to Palomas has been a wonderful mixture of serenity and madness, with some hallucinating thrown in for good measure. We left Merida on the stork highway - a wonderful road where these magnificent birds serenaded us out of town by about by clakking from their perches on the pylons by the side of the road. Before that the Goat nearly crashed into a man who was walking quickly across a bridge smoking a cigar and reading a book. This unusual combination probably takes some skill although clearly he wasn’t very good at it, Talking of unusual sights, in the next village we saw a man who must have had the biggest head in the world and a man on a clapped out motorbike who had a face like a walnut and two workmen’s buckets for panniers. Still they probably think we’re a bit strange, especially now that the Goat has torn a hole in the back of his cycling shorts and is now cruising through Extremadura with his backside hanging out.
The heat is still on. It was 38 degrees at ten o’clock last night so it must be at least 42 now (lunchtime). This is where the hallucinations come in. When it gets that hot you scan the horizon looking for signs that there might be a bar or café in the next village where you can get more water. The tell tale signs are usually a couple of plastic chairs outside the bar. Twice now in our desperate search for a watering hole we have mistaken agricultural equipment for these plastic chairs. It’s easily done - try standing out in the sun for 6 hours with nothing to drink but hot water and then look at a row of red and green tractors - they will look like plastic chairs. The strange thing was that we both made the same mistake! The second incident involved a scooter covered with a piece of old carpet and with an old tomato box strapped on top. On closer inspection this looked nothing like a plastic chair and I can offer no explanation for this ridiculous sighting.
Today was a really hard day, mainly I think because we had expected it to be easy and it wasn’t. The heat was the main problem though the fact that they closed another road in front of us and gave us an extra and unexpected 20kms to do right at the end of the day didn’t help.
But we have made it to Lerena and found a nice hotel near the plaza. The senorita on reception told us we could put the bikes in the hotel garage and gave the Goat directions which included the fact that it had a white door. Unfortunately she didn’t make it clear to the hapless Goat that it was a garage door and so he turned left out of the hotel, as instructed, and then knocked on the door of a private house. “Shall I bring the bike inside?” said the Goat to a bemused woman who was obviously cooking the dinner and he was, I think, about to add, “Shall I put it by the sofa?” when a neighbour intervened and pointed us in the direction of the garage down the road while I apologised profusely to the woman and promised I would never bring him back to Lerena again. The two businessmen who were in the bar of our hotel when we arrived will certainly be hoping that is the case as he has taken to plonking himself in the bar on arrival.
