May 4: Day 7, Rest day in Arroyo Frio

Arroyo Frio is a tourist town, in the offseason right now. There's a ton of restaurants, almost all are shut: presumably hibernating until high season. I'm one of only a few visitors/tourists.

It's also really small. I went for a walk around for some fresh air and could get from one end to the other in five minutes. Google maps thinks there's several supermarkets but only one is open: they had some of that isotonic toothrot so I picked up two bottles for tomorrow. They don't have resealable packets of nuts unfortunately; the ones I got in Lagos were great so I'm keeping my eyes open for more. There was a pharmacy, I was after more packets of oral rehydration powder and with some heavy lifting by Google Translate, I even managed to get some.

I've checked a few things in Komoot, starting with the route up the hill yesterday. Swapping the direction drops the time significantly, so it is actually working in 3D. Which means it knew about the height changes when it routed me up and down steep hills in Cazorla yesterday, and Arjona two days ago. And that's a little disturbing. Because there's a pattern of behaviour here: is this malice?

Probably best to assume it's just a basic routing algorithm and isn't actually bearing a grudge, let's move on...

From the picture timestamps in the WhereIsHugh WhatsApp group I know exactly how long it took me to get from Cazorla to the peak: 1h17. Komoot estimates it as 1h04. But while that time difference is small, it means my time is 20% more than the estimate ... which is understandable, I'm riding uphill with about 20kg of cargo.

That’s all great theorizing, but I'm not enthusiastic enough to figure out the actual ride times for the last week, match them against the estimates, and correlate with the climbs: I'm just going to lowball it with 7 hour days as far as I can, until it gets flat or I get fit or whatever, and the ride times get close to the estimates.

And that's a good time to plan the next week. In the 2nd section of the route splits I set up back in January, the week ended in Montblanc (41.37625, 1.1622). Komoot thinks it'll take 42 hours if I go there directly. Thats 6 days at 7 hours a day. Done. Cake!

What I’m listening to: “November Rain”, piano cover by Viktoriya Yermolyeva: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhbeNEtkgDs

She’s another classically trained pianist who… well, you can guess. She moved into playing metal covers on YouTube; check out her channel (“vkgoeswild”), they’re really good. eg “Sweet Child O’ Mine”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff8UwvPK0G4