Day 14: Malaga to Ronda

So yesterday, after having lunch with the boys at around 3pm, I carried on to our campsite on the western side of Malaga. This added miles into their journey yesterday, but will give them a shorter ride today. 

Ronda is meant to be dead nice, so it made sense to push on through yesterday, have an "easier" day today and get to Ronda earlier to have an actual evening of actually getting out and seeing some stuff. 

Again, last night the boys had finished cycling by 8pm. Once all our jobs were done (tents, laundry, showers, route admin) it was 5 to 10, and the on site restaurant stops serving at 10. We felt bad but essentially pleased with him until he agreed to not actually shut up, but to stay open and cook us some dinner. Oops. We ordered 4 of anything, and ate what we were given. 

Alarms went off at 6am today, and I could hear some russling around my tent. It was a cat family with 4 kittens!! We've become used to being woken by either bird scaring cannons, or dogs barking, so that way quite nice. 

The boys have decided to change the route that James had planned. Instead of 60 miles of relatively flat, they have chosen a slightly shorter, more direct route, of 50 miles with a ginormous hill in it, giving 1000 miles of extra climbing. James had spent quite of lot of time and effort months in advance looking at routes and making sure the roads are able to be riden on, so last minute changes are always a little risky as you don't know if it's just a gravel track. In theory, with the new route they should save apparently about 40 minutes of riding. Although it seemed to take about 40 minutes of faff to change the route on both bike sat navs so I don't really see what they've gained there, other than having to ride up a big hill...?! They also have chosen to not have a lunch stop and just do the 50 miles all at once. 

After having quite a lot of spare time to myself yesterday (hoorah!) I now have a good four hours or so to find a hotel in Ronda, drive over there and find it, go to the shops on my way for petrol and water, and then do some site seeing. Lucky me!!! Ronda is meant to be dead pretty so I'm looking forward to it. I'm just waiting for the sun to come up a little more then I can put the laundry away and get going. 

So this isn't actually our route today at all, but here's a photo anyway. It's now more or less a straight line