Friday October 10, 2014

A short ride today, because we were expecting to be delayed coming back into Spain.

What a waste of time and money, we didn’t get the visa situation sorted out. We cycled towards the border, waiting to be questioned about our time in Spain. Waved through, we stopped and asked for a stamp for Ralf’s passport – “NO STAMP” We told them Ralf was Canadian and needed the stamp. “NO STAMP – VAMOS”. We cycled to the next guy and asked again mentioning Schengen and date. “No Stamp”. Ralf waved his Canadian passport – Schengen date? NO STAMP – VAMOS.

Crap, we missed Cordoba and cycled to Gibraltar and still NO STAMP. Apparently no one cares until you want to leave Schengen Area and then you get into trouble because you don’t have an entry stamp! I guess we will have to use the date we entered England as our time limit, which means we have until the end of November to get out of the Schengen Area.

We chatted to the first touring cyclist we have seen in months. He was a young French man who was heading towards Tarifa and Morocco. He was a little concerned about Morocco, and I think he was still in two minds whether to go or not. After Morocco he is heading to South America. We told him of our route and he warned us about Turkey. This is the second person in two days who has mentioned a problem with Turkey and kidnappings of tourists.

We checked it out on the Canadian government website and it has a travel advisory. “Exercise a High Degree of Caution”. Great everything seems to be going pear-shaped. How do we get to Cyprus without going through Turkey? When we leave Cyprus we have to go through Turkey. Although, Bulgaria, Russia and Turkey all have warnings! All of the Asian countries that we are planning to cycle through also have travel advisories.

Maybe we will spend the rest of our lives cycling through Schengen countries, because while we are here, there are no border controls and no checks…. Vamos.

The route wasn’t too bad today, we did have a bit of a stretch on the motorway (2kms). Now we are on a busy N road, but it seems to be o.k. at the moment. We are camping again tonight at a very nice campsite, although there is no grass, all the pitches are designed for motorhomes and caravans, which means that the designated tent pitches also have stone and pea-gravel. We managed to get the tent up before it started to rain. Quite a storm blew through, then the sun came out, then it rained again.

Over the past few days I am becoming a bit of a worry wart. Will we have time to get to Cyprus before it gets too cold in Italy and Turkey? Should we even be cycling through Turkey, with the travel advisories that we have read. If not what do we do? We don’t want to skip Italy or the many places that we want to see there. Now I am worrying again about Ralf’s Schengen thing. I suppose I should just let “life” happen

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