My bike's come out of the closet

It struggled to stay there, but I kept pushing and, at long last, it gave in. Then it made a mess of the whole flat, but that's another story.

Tania and I met in my flat around 11 am on Sunday. We walked to Plaza de la Villa, where she rented a bike for ten euros for half a day, and kept on walking down Calle de Segovia up to Ronda de Segovia, where we started cycling. At the junction of Paseo Imperial and Paseo de los Pontones we stopped to buy some drinks (Aquarius). We kept on riding up to the Puente de Toledo, we got off the bikes, walked across the bridge and headed for the brand-new stretch of the Salón de Pinos on the west bank of the river Manzanares, opposite the Vicente Calderón stadium.

We started riding continuously at the Jardín de los Caprichos, rode up the Parque de la Cuña Verde de Latina, stopped at a viewpoint that gave us a stunning panorama of Madrid, and took a few photographs, a couple of which are posted here.


At Calle de Valmojado , adjacent to the Parque de Aluche, we joined the Anillo Verde Ciclista (Cyclists' Green Ring) at kilometre 35. We rode across the Paseo de Extremadura (A-5 motorway), stopped at a picnic area in Casa de Campo to have lunch —tuna and meat pies and clementines (micro-clementines for Tania :)—, and resumed our journey past the zoo-aquarium, the lake, across a designer cycle bridge spanning the A-6 motorway, an old bridge that I later learnt is called Puente de San Fernando, a smaller replica of the cycle bridge over the A-6, now spanning the M-30; a simpler (and steeper) bridge that spanned the M-30 again at Calle de Fuentelarreina (by mistake!!), and back across the self-same bridge to return to the right path; through a tunnel down the M-30, next to the Santo Domingo church, which was built right under the motorway :); by the M-40, across the Colmenar motorway, down the railway tracks in Fuencarral, next to the M-40 again, with views of Telefónica's Distrito C and the splendid four towers, and finally to the kilometre 0 (or kilometre 64) resting area, where we called it a day. We took the tram at Palas de Rey stop to Pinar the Chamartín metro station and there we changed to line 1 to Sol (fourteen stations). Tania returned her bicycle to the shop just five minutes before closing time.

My bike is back in the closet.

Credits: Photograph 1 was taken by Tania (the hand is mine!) and photograph 2 by an unknown girl with Tania's camera. Let's call it "Man and the City". It reminds me of a photograph I took in Hampstead Heath, in London.