Today is Friday. It was a completely silent night. No cars, no birds. The tent is completely humid. Sometime I will have to understand when does the tent gets condensation inside or outside and when it doesn’t. The mountain road slowly gets us lower. The forest transforms into orange trees. We are in the middle of the known valencian orange fields. The path is quiet and nice until we approach the suburbs of Valencia and the traffic gets very dense. We get bread in Torrent and decide that we are not yet prepared for crossing a big city. So we change our plan and choose a camp site west of Valencia. Before we go to a huge Carrefour to buy some dinner and land at this camping just next to the highway. It is quite big but still off-season and we get 30% discount. We buy one litre of beer to go with our falafel dinner. Life is to question.

[This is a serie of seven posts, relating last week events. Just one of the thousand ideas that come when you cycle all day long.]

Today is Thursday. We are in Alcalá del Jucar. The room was stuffy without the air conditioned. My ankle is much better and almost not swollen. Eva is relieved. The breakfast is the most industrial possible. We get a full load of glucose-fructose syrup in the mix of cakes provided. The day starts with a steep climb to get out of the canyon. Once outside it seems a different world. We would never imagine that canyon exists in the middle of the flat countryside. We are happy to have discovered it. The road is mostly flat until we arrive to the next larger canyon. At the bottom a desolate village, Casas del Rio, where we picnic next to a river. The clouds are arriving and certainly the rain will get soon to us. The climb has panels every kilometre saying the average and maximum steepness of the following 1000 meters. Still before the second panel we stop to quickly dress up and protect ourselves from the storm under a tree. The rain always arrives on the longest climb of the day. When it starts to calm down we get into the bicycles and continue cycling up. The kilometre panels pass one after another. One hundred meters before the top the rain stops and the sun appears. We are back to shorts and t-shirt for the next few kilometres. In Yatová, after a coffee in a terrace, as soon as we put our hands back to the bicycles it restarts to rain. Back to waterproof clothes. Back to a climb. The road winds up to another mountain. We look for a place to camp. After some effort, we find a place next to a small path. There is no traffic. Life is silence.