It’s been ten years since we last cycled this way, so it’s going to be interesting to see what might have changed.

Ten minutes away from the airport, and we’re pushing against the rush hour on a motorway shoulder… seen this movie before. Add two minutes and we’re stuck in the back of a warehouse peering through linknet fencing to where we think we should be…. played this game before. Correct this aberration only to find that we’re now bumping along a dry river bed… I’ve got the t-shirt already. We can see the hotel, it’s got ten stories, it stands like a beacon…. on the other side of a multi-lane highway that has an impediment of crash barriers in the way…. sorry, read the book already. It’s good to know that some things don’t change when it comes to Biking Spain.

For the ‘Osborne’ bulls still grace the hilltops and artists still paint on blind corners, Tio Pepe still lounges by the road’s verge and people still take their parrots for walks.

And yet, and yet…. all that angst between airport and town will soon be solved when they place the final span of that wooden bridge, another obstacle solution on the Cadiz-Athens EuroVelo route. But the biggest change in these ten years has to be App mapping. Once it was a paper Michelin map that had its fair share of wishful thinking, where the simplest solutions were to cycle the main thoroughfares and hope not to receive too many ‘waggy-fingers’ from the Gardas Civil. Now, with Google and its variants we’ve found deserted tracks through knurled olive groves, navigated around vast stretches of farmland and crossed rivers on exposed ferries, only occasionally ending up in flooded culverts or down narrow alleys looking down a flight of steps and into the Mediterranean Sea.

A ‘deja-vu’ that I’m happy to repeat.