{"id":2532,"date":"2019-07-24T16:01:39","date_gmt":"2019-07-24T16:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.obliquepanic.com\/?p=2532"},"modified":"2019-07-24T16:01:39","modified_gmt":"2019-07-24T16:01:39","slug":"riding-the-bardenas-reales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/riding-the-bardenas-reales\/","title":{"rendered":"Riding the Bardenas Reales"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Day 9 Wednesday 24th<\/sup> July<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today was an easy day, just riding 80 odd miles to, around,\nand back from the Bardenas Reales, a place that has fascinated me since I first\nsaw pictures of it quite a few years ago. Everything went according to plan. I\nset an alarm and  when I arrived\ndownstairs for breakfast at opening time, one person was already leaving and\nanother well into their meal. Unlike my last restaurant there was someone there\nto serve. Every time I think about when to leave tomorrow to get back to the\nport to catch the boat I find myself deciding to leave earlier. Now it is 8.30.\nI was practising my French (they speak some French here \u2013 very little English)\nto ask for special dispensation to check out early but I can see that won\u2019t be\nnecessary. An early start might beat the worst of the temperature as it really\nstarts to rise at lunch time. The boat is due to leave at 3.30 but maybe we can\nboard much earlier \u2013 if we are lucky. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to today. It takes about 20 minutes or so to get to the town where you can find the road that leads onto the Bardenas Reales. It is all dry and agricultural\/industrial around here. On either side of the road you can see the dust rising from the wheels of vehicles on farms and industrial estates. Once you turn into the national park there is a visitor centre with a large car park \u2013 with huge spaces for buses. A few people were there already, though it was only 9 in the morning. You carry on a narrow tarmac road until you get to a fenced off military centre where you have to chose whether to take the gravel track to the left or the right. I chose left, to ride clockwise around the area and to branch off to the north on the way. The desert landscape with its bizarre rock formations and a number of deserted shacks seems more like a constructed film set than a natural feature. It is strange, and strange to be breathing its air, feeling the bumps of the road and experiencing its heat (it wasn\u2019t too bad \u2013 between 26 and 30 degrees) when I have seen so many photographs. I stopped a few times too, to take obligatory photographs and got some good footage of the ride. I headed up the northern track towards El Paso though I turned back before I got there in order to continue to ride in the desert. One great thing about the ride is the confidence I got riding on gravel all morning. To start with I was riding tensely and in second gear. By the end I was sailing along at 30 (over the speed limit) enjoying every slip and slide. So that later in the day when I had to make a U-turn into roadside gravel I did not hesitate. This was a really enjoyable, stress-free, part of the whole trip. I must find more similar challenges \u2013 predictable ones not the crazy narrow tracks that end up going nowhere from earlier in the week. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\"untitled-50.jpg\"<\/a>