When I imagined Semana Santa in Cadiz, I thought it would be two or three religious-themed processions on Thursday and Friday of ‘holy week’. I wasn’t expecting thirty or more of them spread throughout the week and in many cases stretching late into the night. Last night the […]
By Imogen Walker, UNICEF UK Are you looking for a cycle ride with a difference? Or maybe you want to challenge yourself but arenโt quite sure how. Then look no further as Unicef UK are delighted to be able to offer places in the Prudential Ride London 100. […]
Amazing model from 1779 now housed in the Museo de la Cortes. Hanging above the model is an iconic picture depicting the presentation of the 1812 constitution to the King, I think. Two years later in 1814 the (new?) King ripped it up, if not literally then metaphorically. […]
The sun is beginning to set on my time in Cรกdiz. Three more days at the language school followed by a day off and then an early morning bus to Tarifa on Friday to meet up with my uncle and eventually, back in Estepona, my bicycle Reggie. All […]
I would happily class myself as an enthusiastic early adopter of technology, especially when it comes to cycling. Back in 2009 when I cycled along the Pennine Cycleway as a shakedown of my skills as a first time touring cyclistย I blogged as I travelledย having moved on from writing […]
The wonders of mobile blogging… I think I’ve more or less got the whole thing sorted. Here are a few GoPro shots from this morning, transferred wirelessly to my iPhone and beamed up to the Internet via 4G. ย Hopefully also a couple of videos (but it’s there where […]
You may remember – I’ve certainly mentioned it on here before, and probably elsewhere – that one of the principal reasons for choosing to study Spanish at the K2 language school here in Cรกdiz was not just its general location in the heart of the old part of […]
The plan is that two weeks today – Thursday 9th April – I will be standing somewhere near the southernmost point of the European mainland looking north and thinking “here we go again…” (or even, “bloody hell, here we go again…”). Between now and then, my time is […]
I promised this a couple of weeks ago so here it is; the post with all the bikes of Cรกdiz, or at least some of them. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that the city is up there at the top of the European premier league of […]
…and then perhaps this one:
Can I just get something off my chest? Or indeed off my bed here in Cรกdiz. Digestive biscuits as sold by Carrefour here in Spain are not to be mistaken with what most of you and I would consider to be a ‘digestive’ biscuit. Far too sweet, far […]
If you’ve got election fatigue in the UK, spare a though for the poor people in Spain. This year they have a triple whammy of local, regional and national elections to ‘look forward’ to. The election season kicked off yesterday with regional elections here in Andalucia and the […]
There’s a a feeling you get when visiting El Puerto de Santa Maria that its glory days are in the distance past. But what glory days they were; Columbus sailed from here on one of his journeys to the Americas and the first map of the Americas was […]
The photograph below has been inspired by BikeTourGlobal on Instagram doing something similar. That said, it follows on from the photograph that I posted to CyclingEurope.org back in February (which is also at the foot of this post) showing all of the equipment I will be taking with […]
I mentioned The Pillars of Hercules in the previous post and it gave me an idea for a dreary afternoon in Cรกdiz; see how many of them I could spot in coats of arms dotted around the city. The predominant coat of arms shown below is the one […]
A modest collection of contemporary art on the second floor. It didn’t take me long to stroll around. The three-dimensional cardboard piece was my favourite, the contorted bodies reminding me of some of the religious stuff on the first floor (see earlier post). As for the black metal […]
Fun video from last year. I’ve just watched it again after someone shared it on Facebook.
I arrived here in Cรกdiz in the early afternoon of Saturday 28th February. (What do you mean you don’t remember?! Weren’t you paying attention?) I’ve now been in the city for three weeks. It was a beautifully sunny day. I perspired slightly as I carried my bags around […]
Thursday is turning out to be the night of indulgence. In previous weeks it has been tapas and this week it has been the turn of beer. That said the indulging was limited and it was more of a late afternoon event than a full-blown evening one but […]
If you bump into Professor Henry Higgins in the near future, would you mind pointing out that currently the rain is Spain seems to be falling mainly on Andalucia and especially the corner where Cรกdiz is located. However, my mood has lifted somewhat from the mid-Cรกdiz blues that […]
Infographic courtesy of Blue Chip Holidays.
The title might have persuaded you not to bother reading this but for those of you still here… It’s not been a great day. Nothing bad has happened. I haven’t been thrown onto the streets of Cรกdiz or expelled from the language school or anything like that. It’s […]
The second day of our Andalucian road trip (see Saturday’s post for day one) set off inland and headed in an easterly direction to Arcos de la Frontera… …followed by lunch and a mid-afternoon stroll around Grazalema… …and finally a late afternoon visit to Zahara de la Sierra. […]
Sometimes images speak more than words. Today is a good case in mind. Thanks to my very enthusiastic (i.e. he seems to be very good at getting stuff done) fellow student of Spanish, Dutch Mike (he’s not called ‘Dutch Mike’, just ‘Mike’), a car was hired and four […]
By Albert Thompson For a number of poker pros and poker run enthusiasts, cycling is the way to go. Ever since televised poker exploded onto the world stage in a big way about a decade ago, poker has been one of the most watched and enjoyed spectator sports […]
‘Along The Med on a Bike Called Reggie‘ and ‘Crossing Europe on a Bike Called Reggie‘ are still riding high in the cycling books chart – that’s all cycling books, not just Kindle ones – at Amazon.co.uk. If you have been one of the people who have downloaded […]
๏ปฟ๏ปฟ For more information see the festival website.
So, that’s the ‘fine art’ section of the Museo de Cรกdiz done. Spanning the period from the 16th to the early 20th it’s a modest collection of paintings. The earlier stuff is full of virgins, anguished faces, cherubs, monks looking worried… You get my drift. The 16th and […]
Today wasn’t the greatest day in my ongoing efforts to master the basics of the Spanish language. My small class consists of me, a francophone Canadian and a multilingual Dutchman (who is probably reading this so I had better be careful what I say!). Both are very affable […]
So it’s Monday 9th March and I’m just about to start my second week at the language school here in Cรกdiz. Perhaps first of all I should apologise to all those people who are desperate for me to start writing about cycling once again. At the moment there […]
On the Sykes/CyclingEurope Luxembourg scale of local museum quality (where the Luxembourg City History Museum scores a straight 10 – more details here), the Museo de Cรกdiz that I’ve just visited comes out with a high 7. Today’s visit was the first of three that I’m going to […]
Yesterday, following my, err… ‘grate’ morning stroll to the main square in front of the ayuntamiento (or town hall) of the city, I sat down for a few minutes to upload the ‘grate’ pictures [OK, stop with the ‘grate’ jokes now…] to the Internet and to await my […]
I’ve just read the following comment on Instagram and I’m very touched indeed. Many thanks to Dr. Guru Singh for writing whatย he has:
Bear with me on this one… Whatever you may think of grates and manholes (or indeed personholes as I suppose we should nowadays refer to them as), they do come in a great (no pun intended) variety of shapes and sizes. Indeed some are very small, others are […]
It’s not the first time I have used the GoPro camera but it is the first time on this trip that I’ve tried to use it for a proper purpose. The results are mixed. I filmed a time-lapse sunset which was OK but the camera seems to compensate […]
By Felix Leckie This summer I’m planning to cycle 1,450 miles with my dad from home to Slovenia for charity. The charity we are raising money for is called the Childrenโs Bereavement Centre. Itโs a fantastic local charity that helps support children and their families affected by terminal […]
But that’s no bad thing. I’m here for a month and can’t do ‘important’ things every day. And it’s not saying that the ‘unimportant’ things that I did do were nevertheless uninteresting; they weren’t. So what were they? Well the lessons this morning of course (we were studying… […]
I’ve been wandering around Cadiz since my arrival last Saturday, so much of what I saw today on my first proper tour with a guide who knew what she was talking about – it was my teacher at the language school Christina – wasn’t new. But the Torre […]
My cunning plan to continue to use my mobile phone and 3G/4G data during my two months in Spain – see the details at length here – is not working quite as well as I thought it might. To avoid the ยฃ3 per day charge from Vodafone UK, I […]
The plan for today was – and still is – to spend a few hours reviewing my notes from the Spanish course that I completed during the last three months of 2014 at Reading College. I’m slowly getting a little better at coming up with the important bits […]
