Alhama de Murcia to Lorca – 35km
10C
Terrain: roads

I’ve increased my elevation over the past couple of days, only by about 300 meters but it just means that it’s a little chillier up here. A bit of rain too but nothing too dramatic.

It’s nice at the moment because the roads are quite quiet. I’m not sure whether this’ll change when I hit the coast again but it’s lovely.

This being said, I probably had my closest call with a car today who didn’t see me at all. After a bit of shouting and quickly thinking about putting Bob in the way (sorry Bob!), he saw me at the last moment, all fine, phew!

I made good progress today so feeling good. I’m going to try to avoid taking rest days before my parents arrive but it’ll depend on how my body feels, I don’t want to risk anything at this stage either so as difficult as it is, I need to continue to listen to my body.

Looking at landscapes and being in nature a lot of the time really brings home the human imprint on the planet. Interestingly I was listening to a TED podcast today about the beginning of the universe and earth. A paleontologist described how long humas have been on the planet like this:

Imagine an unraveled toilet roll of about 400 sheets and that represents time from the beginning of earth to today. At the 19^th sheet from the end (from the end!), dinosaurs arrive, 5^th sheet from the end, mammals appear and the very last millimeter of the last sheet is us humans. How crazy is that?!

Really puts things into perspective and made me think about the something I have mentioned before, that we are passengers on this earth, both in terms of us as individuals but also humanity itself. In the short time we have been around, my goodness have we had an impact, for better and worse. Obviously the impact on the environment comes to mind. Need to continue focusing on sustainable living.

A few pics from today.

Moody skies but not as much rain as yesterday.