A gorgeous day of riding. We are three days and around 225 km into our trip and are starting to find our rhythm. Riding across Granada, the sun comes up and we watch the city come to life: parents walking kids to school, groggy university students heading to morning classes, bread trucks making deliveries, shops opening and smartly dressed professionals headed to work. It’s bustling. This is not a city that work from home has sapped of its vitality. The neighborhoods are made up of attractive and dense housing: attached townhomes and midrise apartment buildings with all manner of retail on the ground floor, lots of trees and plenty of parks. Every block or two is an area where residents bring their recycling, including not just cardboard, glass plastic and compost, but used clothing and batteries too. Take that Seattle.
Beyond Granada, we pass through agricultural areas and small towns. In one, we stop for a coffee in the plaza and are surrounded by a bunch of older caballeros smoking, drinking coffee after coffee and cracking jokes. They seem happy. I also discover a delicious snack: “pan tomate” – essentially toasted baguette with crushed fresh tomato drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt. With cafe con leche – devine.
We make our way along narrow roads that wind through olive groves and acorn tree forests and beside green fields with onions, asparagus and many crops we don’t recognize. By mid afternoon we arrive at our hotel, a tranquil hacienda that was once a hunting lodge and is now a rural retreat for bird watchers and ramblers. A sunset walk helps fill the time before dinner, which starts at a very Spanish 8:30 pm.
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Amazing photo of what I think is a water viaduct stretching into the distance
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gorgeous pictures of andalusian life
I hope you get some shots of the Alhambra- makes you realize Versailles wasn’t the original garden palace
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We have a lot of Alhambra shots and yet they just don’t capture the experience of the carvings, tile work, and pools and gardens.
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There’s so much tactility in your daily experiences that translates even from afar. (Thanks for letting us tag along!) The high quality urban and rural grain of these territories (and food like pan tomate, which makes me long for rustic Italian food) marries up beautifully with your physical adventures. Gorgeous.
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Yay! más fotos!! Although I feel it is just wrong to type the word Hacienda and then leave no pics of it……loving the story, I DID help put together and guide the original B&R trip, one of my favorite things was seeing the big acorn eating pigs that become jamon iberico at repose in their fields……probably not on your route but let me know if you go near Ecija! Buen Viaje!
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We will be south of Ecija since we are heading to Cadiz and then south to catch a ferry to Morocco (landing first in Ceuta, Spain?!)
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That old boy on the bike — that’s you in 40 years, Gabriel.
Is that tree packed with oranges or persimmons???
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Ba! @riccochrane, I think he’s more likely to be that suave fella with the cigarello sipping cafes into the dusk with his friends…
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