Art of Travel: Paris to Madrid
Day Thirteen
Before going to sleep I left out the bag with the Giclee prints of paintings and other artwork to remind me to try to pack them in a manner which guarantees they won’t get wet. Unfortunately they must have fallen from up against the pannier bag during the night because I woke with legs on top of them. I haven’t checked to see if they are squashed or not. The alarm went off at 06.00 and forty-five minutes later I was unlocking Art. As it transpired the ball bearings’ life expectancy were not to be at the fore front of my worries today. After fixing the front wheel to Art I noticed that the back wheel was badly buckled, so bad in fact that it would no longer complete even half a rotation without the rim jamming hard against the brake blocks.
Straight away the cause of the wheels new and unwelcome distorted shape became apparent, and I cursed the little buggers. On Saturday evening, while sheltering from the rain in my tent, I could hear two teenage boys kicking a football at each other close by. One would just boot the ball with all his might to the other lad, then his playmate would return it with equal force. At the time I was preparing dinner and remembered thinking that they had better not hit my tent. Not long after that I thought I heard an almighty clamour of the ball hitting something metal. As far as I could remember the only thing metal out there was the rubbish bin which was concreted into the ground. They really gave it a hell of a wallop. What I had forgotten was that the bin was all the object which I had locked Art to, and it was the rear wheel of Art which took the full force of their strike.
While trying to tighten and loosen the appropriate spokes, in order to reshape the wheel, I ended up destroying the square ends of more spokes. One kick of a football and my journey has been thrown onto its head. However, I was still determined to get to Girona today, and to enable me to do so the obvious course of action to take was to disengage the rear brake blocks which would allow the wheel to rotate. What the hell, it makes going downhill that bit more adventurous! It was either that or remain stranded in Colera, which was an option I was not prepared to settle on. It worked out better than I had hoped for and I soon got use to the slight wobble, and did not notice it slowing me down too much, although it obviously did.
The road to Girona, via Figueres, was a rather dull run on a very busy main road, but I arrived on the campsite just outside the small village “Fornells de la Selva”, 8km south of Girona, by around 12:30. Its located on a remote little farm surrounded, funnily enough, by farmland and all the associated sounds, sights and smells. Riding down the country lane to the campsite brought me back to my boyhood in Co. Kildare exploring on bike the country lanes surrounding our home.
The owner was pleasant, helpful and spoke excellent English. He told me that he is trying to collect an example of each of the new coinage from all participating countries within the Euro-zone. So he was pleased that I was able to provide him with his first examples from Ireland, although I don’t suppose it will get me any discount from the ten Euros per night charge.
Ok, I admit this may sound selfish but after setting up camp on a near deserted and idyllic rural campsite I was rather disappointed to find, on returning from Girona later that afternoon that a big campervan form Holland had parked right beside me. To make matters worse two teenage boys in the van had mental disabilities causing them to howl loudly as if they were possessed by some evil spirit. They didn’t seem to tire of this. I just hope they like to get their heads down early and have a solid twelve hours sleep. Lying on the grass by my tent, bloated after eating far too much for dinner, I noticed that all had gone relatively quite next door. The boys must have been administered their after dinner sedatives.
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