Saturday December 20, 2014

We left the campismo at 8:20 after an awful breakfast. Fortunately we still had bananas and nuts to eat on the road.

Once again today’s ride was along the beautiful coastal road – I am referring to the scenery not the state of the road.

The road was bad, but we knew it would be, very similar to yesterday’s bad roads but today we had hills and quite a few of them. The disadvantage of hills on a bad road is that you very rarely get the rewards of a good downhill, because you are watching for the potholes and non-existent paving.

That being said it was an awesome ride. After about 37 kms (half way) I wasn’t sure we were going to make Pilon it seemed to be taking forever. It was very hot 34 degrees but not humid, which made it easier to ride. After about the 50 km mark the roads improved slightly and there were no more big hills to climb just rollers.

There were some interesting parts to the coastal road, including the tunnels which didn’t seem to go straight through the mountain. We were not sure if they were used during the revolution (1956) but they seemed to modern for that, or were run-offs, or perhaps were tunnels but had caved in. This truck needed to follow the same route as we did along the very rough road, so didn’t use the tunnel.

We met two female touring cyclists who had cycled from Pilon we compared notes and they told us about the casa that they stayed in the previous night, Casa Umberto. They gave us directions to the casa and we found it quite easily. We told Umberto who had recommended his casa and he was very pleased.

After rinsing out our cycling gear, we went for a walk around the grand metropolis of Pilon. We spotted a guy roasting a big pig. We stopped at a little cafeteria where we asked if they had cheese sandwiches. No, now they had bread and they had cheese to put on the spaghetti but they couldn’t make cheese sandwiches. I commented on this fact to Ralf, I am guessing the lady understood some English because she said she would look to see if she had enough cheese. She did and we got our cheese sandwiches. She then offered us the spaghetti with cheese, and as we were both hungry we ate that as well.

Umberto’s mom is making dinner and we will have breakfast here as well.