Sunday, May 28th 2023.
Setenil de las Bodegas to Ardales.
We’ve awoke from our cave at 7:00 am after a very restful sleep in complete silence. It was kind of cave like really, imagine that, especially since we occupied the back bedroom of the cave away from the narrow front road that had traffic until 11:00 pm.
I’ve never been in a house that was so solid. It’s build completed out or rock, stone, plaster and steel and there’s not a board that creeks or a wall that flexes when you close the door. These modern day troglodytes have it figured out.
We hit the road at exactly 9:00 am after a quick shot of caffeine from the corner confectionery and proceeded uphill on a path we checked out yesterday. Little did we know that today would start with an extreme 5 Km uphill that wouldn’t taper off until we entered the province on Malaga crossing a railway track 5 K later, and then rise again for another 3 K. The road was winding, uphill, beautifully paved, but still uphill. In the past I’ve seen my Garmin watch record 158 BPM (beats per minute) for my heart rate, and one day it went to 159 when we were ascending El Torcel last week. Today it registered 161 EPM (Explosions Per Minute) and if the old ticket was going to pack it in, it probably would have been today.
There were quite a few road bikers coming down the hill towards us for our first hour and I was thinking they’re a bunch of wimps since they’re flying down assisted with gravity and grinning ear to ear. Little did I know, some of them had been working their way uphill all morning, and when I say uphill, I mean uphill. 27 kilometres of uphill to be exact. This isn’t the steepest uphill we’ve seen so far, but certainly the most of it. The stats on Run Keep speaking for themselves.
Away we went enjoying the downhill trek amongst the traffic of a busy highway heading out towards Ardales thinking that this must be the reward for all the mountains we’ve pushed and peddled up lately. After several beautiful farm houses, sheep herders, and vast fields of barley, oats and now lemons, we could see Ardales up on the mountain.
We arrived at high noon and sat in the Center of town enjoying a cervesa, which led to another and then the rain came. The waiter shuffled us inside to a packed house since it was Sunday and it was voting day for the locals deciding on who their new mayor would be. The rain didn’t slow any of the festivities down and we soon made our way up to our casa on a farm outside of town 1 1/2 up a winding road. Everything ends in an uphill around here.
Our casa was wonderful and came with a resident horse, donkey and an astounding view of the valley that we came through hours ago, complete with a lake, wind and solar farms.
The Heathen Toe visits Ardales.
E/D=B. Effort + Distance = Beer required. Although we had negative E and positive D figures compared to past days, it didn’t seem to affect the B required to do the required distance. We’ll have to replicate the experiment tomorrow and compare our findings.