20 years ago today – Day 8

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March 11 – Setubal to Evora, 272 km

For our second day of loaded touring in a row, our day begins with a ferry ride, this time from Setubal across the mouth of the Sado River to Troia. Troia looked so grand with its white towers gleaming in the sunset across the harbour as we glided into Setubal last evening. I was really looking forward to seeing it up closely. Now we see it for what it is – a trashy condo/convention centre – not a town at all. We circle around looking for a supermarket but nothing is open. We decide to get what we need later, but first I need to find a washroom. The fish burger I had for dinner last night is struggling to escape and find its way back to the sea. We find an upbeat hotel with a restroom just inside the door so I don’t need ask permission from the desk clerk. It is 9:20 by the time we are finally on the road.

Troia sits at the north tip of a long sand spit peninsula that separates the Sado River from the sea. The road is very straight and rises and falls as a gentle reflection of the much higher dunes to the west. Scrub bush and patches of flowers dots the dunes. There is hardly any traffic. Mike is leading at a break-neck pace. I am overheating in my sweater, jacket and tights which I donned on the ferry to keep off the early morning chill. I want to complain about the pace but he already thinks I am a wimp who needs to be whipped into shape, whether or not my knees are ready for it. Besides, he wants to make it to Alcacer do Sal before the banks and supermarkets close for lunch.

The dune road ends at a small village named Comporta. There are sidewalks but no paved streets. We find a grocery store and buy juice, bread, cheese and fruit. After our mid-morning snack, I shed my sweater and jacket and we’re back on the road, this time headed east on N253 15 km to Alcacer. The route is flat and Mike sets a fast pace again. I keep up with him for the first 10 km but then fall back. He eases up somewhat to accommodate me.

There is more vegetation the further inland we go, but we are still beside the estuary of the Sado. Wherever the ground is eroded I see sand below the soil. Gradually farms begin to appear as we approach Alcacer.

We arrive in Alcacer just before noon. I go into a bank to buy some Portuguese escudos and the teller gets alarmed when he sees that I have forgotten to sign my travelers cheques. He asks me where I got them and why I didn’t have to sign them at the time. He calls the bank manager who advised him not to cash them. For a minute I am afraid I will lose them but the teller advises me to leave, sign them and then take them to another bank. Mike, who works in international banking, is not at all impressed.

The hills are green immediately beyond Alcacer as we follow N5 and the north side of the Sado River valley deeper into the rolling, rising plain called the Alentejo. In a couple months it will be a dry, gold-brown, Mike tells me, but now it is green with the winter rains. We climb 200m and have broad vistas of a variety of farmlands. It is much more pleasant and more interesting than yesterday.

Mike has pulled ahead out of sight again, but I catch up with him past the bottom of a long downhill and partly up the next hill. He is off his bike at the side of the road picking something out of the dirt. “Mechanical problems” is all he says when I ask him what is up. His freewheel has come apart and when he took the rear wheel off the ball bearings inside spilled onto the ground.

Now it’s my turn to be unimpressed, but I am not as silent about it as he usually is. How can your freewheel fall apart on the second day of a year-long trip? Didn’t your take your bike it for an overhaul before we left, I asked him. It wasn’t necessary, he argues. It’s been problem-free for months. Obviously it was necessary, I retort, but you just didn’t do it.

I am sure the freewheel will never work again but he insists on finding all the spilled bearings and patching the freewheel together the best he can, so I am on my hands and knees helping him look for them. He manages to get it back together but not before he realizes that all the larger bearings on the outer part of the freewheel had fallen out before this. We are still 50 km from our day’s destination, the walled city of Evora.

N5 becomes N2, and then N380 as we limp on towards Evora. Mike is unable to coast. He must keep him pedals rotating at all times which is tiring for him. Serves him right, I say under my breath. He has to go slower now so it is easy to keep up with him. I don’t let him out of my sight in case the situation gets worse. Grocer boys in a village named Apeadeiro de Alcacovas run out to greet us and check out our bikes. At another point we are lost and a stranger, seeing us reading our maps, saves us from taking a wrong route.

The last ten km of highway before Evora are paved with uneven brick that act as a full-body vibrator. That slows us right down. We ride for short stretches on the shoulder where we can to avoid the rattling. Any ball bearings we repacked into Mike’s freewheel were gone by the time we got to the gates of Evora.

The youth hostel in Evora is closed. We rent a room on the third floor of a pension named Giraldo’s for 2400 esc and dine at a restaurant beneath a different pension that we declined because of the cost. We are grateful to have made it to Evora before dark and we’re able to laugh at the day’s misadventures now that they are behind us. We covered 123 km today. We’re dead tired and have earned a good night’s sleep.

PHOTO 1: Alcacer do Sal
PHOTO 2: Mike at Alcacer do Sal
PHOTO 3: cork oak tree on the Alentejo
PHOTO 4: Mike, nearing Evora with busted freewheel