Where's Bertie? He's still in the Aire at Vilanova.
Weather: Not a hint of a cloud seen all day. Cool overnight, but reaching 18 degrees this afternoon, although with a cool breeze.
We aren't very far inland here, but we are at an altitude of 350m where the nights are cooler than down on the coast. We certainly would have wanted the heating on first thing, if I hadn't had a loaf ready to go in the oven. The oven duly heated Bertie, and the loaf turned out to be a good one too.
The cool start caused us to be slower getting out the door than may otherwise have been the case, so it was ten to ten by the time we finally made it out of the car park (we'd exited Bertie for the first time a few minutes earlier, but one of us was proving to be disorganised ... and it wasn't Mick).
The route I'd downloaded led us mainly off-road, via an excavated Roman site, to the next village along. There we took a detour to the bar for coffee, only to see on our approach that the outside seats were empty and the door shut. Mick was just complaining that I'd lured him out under false promises of refreshment, when I tried the door to find it open. The seats inside were set out in the manner of a school canteen, and were also all empty. "Are you sure you fancy this?" I asked, and with Mick's nod, in we went. It turned out there was one set of customers, sitting on a terrace on the other side of the building, but we must have just preceded rush-hour, as more came in whilst we sat there.
The coffee was excellent, but it didn't take us long to polish off both that and our toast, before we headed back out to the next point of interest. We'd already passed a large bicycle, and now we were to do a loop that would take us past a chair. A very steep and heavily washed out incline was involved in getting there.
Our route then took us back to the village and straight past the bar, but I maintain that, due to the time of day, we were right to have made the detour on the first pass. We were then on the (slightly longer) return leg back to Vilanova, via quite a few points of interest with information signs, although most were only in Valencian Spanish. I'm slow enough reading Castilian, and even though many of the words in Valencian are similar, there are enough differences to make them largely incomprehensible to me. Still, we got the gist that they had water management systems to assist with agriculture, including water wheels and donkey-driven pumps. Talking of water, the streams were all running well today, giving us a few obstacles to tackle in the form of fords, all of which (with some faffing) we managed to cross dryshod.
A large group of walkers were met just before we got back to Vilanova, with many a ¡hola! exchanged, then it was time for us to peel off for the climb back up the hill to the village. The church, which doesn't look that imposing when you see it from the front (in a residential street, in between houses), looks massive when seen from the NW. Reaching it was the sign that we were nearly back at Bertie.
It wasn't the best route I've done in this region, but it was inoffensive, with some mildly interesting history dotted along it. It came in at just over 13km with 250m-ish of ascent.
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