Getting Out of Seville to Venta del Alto

Well, as one of the Vendee Globe sailors who we have been following in this year’s round-the-world, singlehanded sailing race, says, “The adventure starts when the problems start.” Not remotely on the same scale, but we had a heck of a time getting out of Seville onto our N630 route the morning we left.

Jim was using the Ruta de La Plata app to get us out of the city and and onto the N630, our road going north. While we crossed the river to the right bank with no problem, we could not find a way along a major highway that the app directed us to, that supposedly would connect us to a minor road and to the N630.

We flailed around with increased frustration and then decided to follow the directions in our Ruta de La Plata book for cyclists. We retraced our steps and followed the book’s directions to the letter - interesting directions like “take the scruffy cycle path on the far side of the first exit about 90 meters down into a car park where, on some large concrete pipes, are yellow Camino arrows.” And that was exactly right! It finally dawned on us that the app was giving a route for vehicles, not bikes. Arghh - 2 hours wasted! As the book’s author says, “Escaping Seville is the worst part of the day.” He got that right. Note to Seville and Spanish tourism folks now promoting the Ruta de la Plata - add some decent map info and signage to your otherwise excellent city cycle path infrastructure to guide cyclists out of the city and onto the Ruta, but again we are reminded that we live in a car-centric world!

The up-side of our misadventure was that we got to see a hoopoe bird and I managed to take a picture of this crazy looking guy! Hoopoes are colourful birds found across Africa, Asia, and Europe, notable for their distinctive "crown" of feathers which can be raised or lowered at will. I wasn’t able to capture that aspect but here is a “borrowed” photo of this bird in his full glory.

We finally got ourselves on the route, after maneuvering around traffic circles in the small town of Santiponce and getting some direction from another cyclist, happy to see the N630, Camino, and Merida signs - Merida being a major destination for us some days up the route. But we still had to escape the ugly industrial park sprawl on the outskirts of Seville and the big trucks. It was a relief when we finally got clear of that and were out in the countryside. Whew!

We were headed for the small town of Venta del Alto, where again our accommodation options had been limited.

Jim is trying to keep our daily distances reasonable AND find a destination where we can book accommodation. Some places en route are quite small. It was a day of undulating hills, not too steep but a quite a workout nonetheless. Up and down, up and down for almost 50 km. We were climbing from the coastal plain of Andalucia onto the meseta, Spain’s central Plata or plateau that we would be riding on later, in flatter terrain. We were now in the “dehesa”, a landscape of cork oak meadows and pastures. Though it was a lovely sunny day, with no wind to cope with, the climbs were gentle and the scenery was stunning, I was getting cranky. It was just hard and longer than we had planned due to our “problemo” exiting Seville.

We finally did one last big climb and found our hotel just outside town, sitting by itself at the crest of a hill. Venta del Alto’s accommodation choices had been pretty limited so we didn’t have high expectations. Hotel las Cumbres turned out to be an old country inn, full of traditional furnishings. The roadside building was a bar and restaurant and we were directed to wheel our bikes through into a big open garden courtyard and into the building behind where all the rooms were. Our room was on the second floor and looked out over the courtyard. It was freezing in the room - likely the heat had not been on for awhile so we had hot showers, cranked up the heat pump and got under blankets til the chill was off.

We had been asked if we wanted lunch when we checked in but we had had a sandwich on the road and of course were not hungry then. The kitchen would as usual close at 4 and open at 8. No worries - we were just happy that we would be able to get dinner and breakfast the next morning there. So at 8 pm we headed to the dining room and we told to sit anywhere. We found an inner dining room away from the bar where an actual wood fire was weakly burning - one piece of olive wood - in a fireplace. There was a little table right in front of that so we sat there and absorbed a bit of the warmth. When you think how excruciatingly hot it must be in the summer, it amazes me how resilient the Spanish seem to be to the winter chill - eating outside, doors wide open if inside. When our young server appeared, I asked if there might be more wood. No, he said. However, I guess he took pity on us as he later appeared with a little bucket of knobs of wood and put a few on - not all of them though. That hard wood sent off a very nice heat however and we were quite cosy for the time we sat there.

We has pursued the quite long dinner menu in our room that seemed to contain all kinds of exotic dishes of the country - pheasant, wild boar, rabbit etc. we had both decided on something less exotic - a shared ensalada and I forget what else but when it came to ordering our server looked dubious, went away for quite awhile to see if they had that and when he eventually returned, the answer was no to all our choices. Understandable as we seemed to be the only quests. We finally asked what we could have, especially “verduras” - vegetables and he offered asparagus with egg. I said no egg and this is what we got. We thought we had ordered two main entrees but he only brought one and we decided that was enough. We were hungry after our strenuous day, it was plenty of food and tasted pretty good. I splashed out by having a arroz con leche - rice pudding - for dessert and it was delicious.

We had a good sleep in our funny old fashioned room in spite of being woken up at 2 am by the only other guests - a couple of guys who had been yakking it up with our server in the bar when we left after dinner - drunkenly I assume, trying their key in our door by mistake. They moved on without too much fuss when they had no success.

We returned to the bar for deysauno the next morning and then headed out, on another beautiful sunny morning for another day of hill climbing. Oof! Glad I had that rice pudding!