Estepona

About an hour before sunrise my daily routine starts with the opening of the bedroom curtains, then I return to bed with a brew and gaze out to the lights on the horizon and wonder what experiences the dark continent holds. But it doesn’t give me an overwhelming desire to go, it just interests me, and may feature on my bucket list. I did a lot of research on Morocco for our planned trip in 2020 and still have all those ‘must see’ places on my Google map, who knows what the future holds.

As the sun rises and the twinkling lights disappear sometimes the land is visible and sometimes not, but across to the right where Gibraltar is almost always clearly in view, so is the Moroccan mountain of Jebel Musa, such names conjure up mysteries yet to be discovered (in my limited tourist world).

Last year, heck was it only last year, well about twenty months ago to be more accurate, that I returned from La Gomera to Tenerife, and stayed in a hotel for ten days. It was too long, I felt it then and with hindsight I still feel it. Yes I would go out every day on the motorcycle and try to find the few roads on the island that I hadn’t already discovered, but to have one base for such a long time wasn’t for me, it didn’t sit well with my limited attention span, I think I need to be ‘doing’.

Neither Rachel nor I were never the sitting on the beach type, nor sunbathing by the pool, that was how we felt independently, and I think it is still very much me now. Our form of relaxation was about seeing new places, others may have thought that we couldn’t sit still and that’s possibly still the case with me.

Tomorrow will be my eighth and final night here, it hasn’t been too long, but long enough.

Going for a drive in this car is giving me a bigger kick than I expected. I love having a spin up into the hills to visit the sugar cube villages, for which Andalusia is famed, and also to catch glimpses of the vultures which inhabit the high rocks in the area. At no time have I wished to be on the bike, it’ll be interesting to find out how I feel when I jump aboard one of them on a cold sunny day ‘up north’.

I came down to the ‘coast of the sun’ for a couple of reasons, to help repair this battered body with some sunshine, or at least to visually help, and to treat it as a winter training camp, like I would have done when doing triathlon twelve years ago! It’s serving the purpose for the first reason, I think I’m looking better if nothing else, a bit of colour always helps. The winter training camp idea hasn’t worked. Yes I’ve increased the distances of my walks and did do a little swimming back in Portugal, but I’m afraid that’s been it. I’ve done a reasonable amount of walking down here but no jogging or swimming, my mind says I can do it but my body is objecting, for a change I’m listening to my body!