110 down, 1100 to go

By keeping up a good pace, riding through the heat of the day and limiting myself to one stop of 45 minutes I made up nearly all the time I lost by setting off late. I arrived in Cogolludo just before nine, only about an hour after I'd planned.

I didn't want to stop and take many pictures today because I was trying to crack on but I was taken by the beauty of the landscape.

I spent most of the afternoon looking at the Sierra de Guadarrama, turned blue in the afternoon haze, floating on a foreground of golden fields. The dull brown scrub land that you see from the air is actually bright gold when seen up close. The central plain of Madrid (La Mancha) is unfairly maligned.

The cycling has been very good. I've hardly seen a car all day, even in Madrid (an unexpected benefit of leaving in the heat of an August Sunday afternoon).

Having done the first day I now have absolutely no worries about the rest of the trip. Barring mechanical failure or some unexpected event like a bear attack, I think my schedule is more than doable. In 8 hours today I did what I had planned to do in 10 or 11 hours.

For the bike geeks among you:
I had a couple of minor technical glitches:

- It turns out that if I put my bike computer into its fitting shoe while the bike is moving it resets everything. So I've lost the first 62 km of the trip.

- about 30 mins from the end of the day, the cable to the front derailleur popped out of its clamp screw. Easy to fix but worth a mention because this has never, ever happened to me before. I guess the screw shook loose.

- slightly more concerning, I noticed a ding in the back wheel which has the rim almost rubbing one of the brake pads. This could just be coincidence or it could be a symptom of the amount of weight on the back wheel. My panniers are surprisingly heavy. I hope I don't have more trouble with this - wheels are an absolute swine to fix. I'm going to true the wheel tomorrow morning and hope it gets me to my rest day when I can check it in to a bike shop and see if they can look at it the same day.

Finally, to file under "slice of life":

After checking in, I asked the hotel owner, in my most polite English tourist's Spanish, if she could recommend a restaurant in the village.

"Recommend?!" She replied, "Not in the sense that I understand the word, no. They're all the same."

Can't argue with that.

BC