Wednesday December 31, 2014

As we left Sancti Spiritus we noticed this Giant Fish, not sure why as the town is not near the sea.

What an excellent ride today. Some hills but easily managed with some great rollers that by peddling hard down hill we could get up the other side without so much of a change of gears, loved it.

The road surface was good for the most part which also helped when zooming down the hills and “coasting” up the other side. My top speed was 52 kph which I thinkis the fastest I have allowed myself to go in Cuba.

Within the first 20 kms we met up with another Canadian couple from Yellowknife. We chatted to them for a while, they were going to be in Trinidad tonight but I think it would have taken them a bit longer to get here than it did us. She said she wasn’t very good on the hills, we didn’t tell her, she had quite a few hills to climb today.

I did worry about her a bit today, as there is nothing worse than having to struggle up hills and in the heat of the day. It was overcast to start of with, but the temperature reached 30 degrees by about 11:00 and it is tough to cycle hills in the heat.

The scenery once again was lovely we passed this pig farm which surprisingly had lot of pigs in it.

There was one long steep hill to climb before arriving in Trinidad.  The view from the top was very nice and looked down over the valley.

We arrived at the casa that Maria from Havana had recommended to us. We had reserved when we were in Guaimaro, but when we got to her place she didn’t have room in her casa but took her to her brother’s casa up the street. She insisted we have dinner with her and her family tonight, which we really looked forward to. She showed me the leg of pork we are going to have and asked if I thought it was going to be big enough! It was huge. New Year’s eve shared with a Cuban family. Consequently we ate dinner much later than usual at 8:00 pm.

As usual after our shower, we walked into the historic centre. Trinidad is also celebrating 500 years and is a Spanish Colonial City. In the historic centre all of the streets are cobbled streets. We are staying about one block away from the start of the cobbled streets, I am pleased about that because in my opinion there is nothing worse than cycling on cobbled streets.

We had lunch at a quiet little restaurant just off the main tourist streets. The two children in the casa came to join us while we were waiting for our meal of spaghetti. This little girl sang to us, what she lacked in tone she made up for in volume!

Ralf and I played jacks with the little boy.

Dinner was really good and we chatted to them for a while. We had picked up a bottle of sparkling wine earlier on which we had put in the refrigerator in the casa. After dinner we went back to the casa and picked up our sparkling wine and headed back to the square to listen to music and get ready for the New Year. It was a bit of an anti-climax, we opened our “champagne” and watched the firework display 🙂 well two flares and a firework.

We were in bed by 12:30.