This email is going to our many sailing friends. We are no longer living on the boat and if you want to stop receiving emails write to harmonicahutch at gmail.com.

Again, I knew that opportunities were in front of me, but had no idea what would be the details of my next month. I had tickets from Canada to Spain, a bicycle which I packed in a cardboard box, and enough personal items to fill 2 pannier bags. The night before flying the forecast for Madrid was 4 degrees, wet, and windy so cycling across an unknown city feeling tired felt a poor plan: I went onto the Internet at 2 am and booked a taxi van from the airport big enough to take my bicycle box.

The taxi dropped me in Villaverde Bajo at the address I had booked - a less smart region of the southern suburbs where the streets were narrow and lined with 4 story apartment buildings and little convenience shops. I am lucky to have always lived in a house with a garden. Finding the right button & saying my name, the door buzzed & I went in. My landlady was kind and offered all that was expected and more, but she needed crutches to go outside and there were 6 flights of stairs to her front door.

I allowed a day to acclimatize and wrestled down the unfamiliar machines at the entrance to the Metro so the automatic gates opened to let me onto the underground train into the city. Being Spain, there was a fiesta, throngs of tourists, mobile TV units, and much of the military wearing historical uniforms and riding horses.

Escaping the throngs, I wandered round the extensive formal parks and looked at the lines of people waiting to enter the Prado Museum, and adjacent tulip gardens. Then to the business of getting my smart-phone working. There was a really cheap deal with some unknown company which might or might not have coverage in Spanish villages. The Vodafone Shop showed me a great service but they had run out of the required SIM cards so sent me back into central Madrid, where Vodafone had the cards but couldn't sell them because their computer was down!

Having assembled my boxed bicycle, I rode out of Madrid next morning, following the many cycle lanes marked on the offline maps on my phone. It worked well except that I needed the map & GPS every few minutes so by the time I stopped for "la menú del día" in a country town, and written to tell my host in Toledo that I should arrive about 3.30, my battery went flat. Without maps I turned west through north into the wind, and had to retrace about 20km, arriving in Toledo at nearly 6.

By this time my Air bnb host had left his apartment in the narrow cobbled medieval streets and I had to accost some women in the street to exchange use of my maps for a phone call to let me in. It was a magnificent moorish building with ancient stone walls surrounding a courtyard with a well, providing complete peace from the streets outside.

There was just time left to walk a lap of the Old Town and find a bar preparing to close in front of the Alcázar where she heated a plate of pork stew accompanied by potatoe salad and a glass of beer. Next morning, the phone re-awoke with a message "SIM LOCKED" so back to Vodafone where they showed me what to do to the accompaniment of rapid technical Spanish. I completed my sightseeing and was cycling up the valley side soon after 1.

Major find: in the region of Don Quixote, I found a coffee and cakes shop called Dulcinea presumably named after our boat.

I took a wrong turn again on my way through Castilla La Mancha but found my error much quicker. There are snow-capped mountains SW & broad rolling hills of barley, olives, citrus, and scrub around me.

My host in Orgaz is a wonderful, intelligent gentleman - born in Sicily during the war, emigrated to Peronista Argentina at the age of 7, returned to Italy Switzerland Germany and Spain by which time he spoke 5 languages but had missed out on much formal schooling. He married and moved to Calgary where he opened a fine restaurant, then returned to his wife's village where I am writing this on his patio overlooking a wide valley of fields and olive groves with chickens clucking round the corner.

My book says Castilla La Mancha has the lowest population density and fewest tourists in Spain. It has a fascinating history of Romans, Visigoths, Moors, Christians and Jews. It suits me well.

Dave