If you ever find yourself in the South of Spain, make sure you visit Vejer de la Frontera, a totally white village situated on the top of a hill.
Also, well worth spending a good number of days here, to really get to know the feel of the community.

We arrived in Vejer on the 1st july, which is a few weeks before the main tourist season but all the restaurants and bars are peaceful and ready for action. Arriving here also coincided with my first day of being self-employed, after 17 years with the same company in Sydney I decided to become a full-time freelancer, this of course gave me a bit of extra leeway in managing play & work time 🙂

I headed out on my roadie a few days and dropped into the local bike shop to ask about bunch rides, not having any Spanish or the shop keeper having much English, we resorted to Google Translate on the shops computer and I got the message that there were only MTB bunch rides on Saturdays & Sundays. Not that it was clear if that meant every day or sometimes Saturdays and other times Sundays, as I tried a couple of times without anybody showing.

Not much roadie action around here that I could see, as the bitumen roads are good but few and far between, a bit like Australia where you have to ride about 40km just to get a loop in. Anyway, I ride a mixture of road and MTB during the week and meet up with the local bunch on the weekend –when they show.

The local bunch is much more like Aus than the French, in that they ride to a cafe for breakfast –although in the middle of the ride– and also ride for a beer/coffee/Sangria after the ride in Vejer.
It was fun trying to make conversation with very little English around the bunch and it was surprising how many Spanish words are understandable, especially together with our hands, feet and funny facial expressions.

I ended up having 3 bunch rides here and on my final ride with them everyone finished together for brunch with prawns, local tomato salads, beer, Tinto Verrana –a local speciality made with red wine and sparkling lemon juice– and an impromptu dance come karate-kid performance to liven up the party!

Here are a whole bunch of photos:
Best viewed online rather than in the email. As usual, click the photos to see them larger.