Hotel fitness bikes fill a niche
When western and southern Spain sights, food, and fun overwhelm
Sometimes a hotel fitness center bike is all you have during travel. Make use of them. You don’t have to ask for directions in a language you don’t speak, worry about the weather, watch out for traffic, ride cobblestones, navigate flurries of roundabouts and speed bumps, wear a helmet or fix a flat. Though some hotel gym bikes don’t always function properly, hotel cycling certainly has its benefits.
So it was last November as I logged nearly 30 miles indoors during a group visit to western Spain’s Extremadura (turismoextremadura.com) region near the Portuguese border.
You’ll need to bike off the area’s wonderful food highlighted by acorn-fed Iberian pigs, cheese, olive oil, and wine, the more homemade the better.
The region is also loaded with alluring ancient ruins left behind in a country founded by Romans, destroyed by Visigoths, rebuilt by Arabs, fortified by Moors and reconquered by Christians.
Can you imagine placing a plastic hairnet over your helmet or blue plastic slippers over your cycling shoes? Don’t have to on a stationary bike I thought as I toured a cheese factory, Dona Francisco, outside the old walled quarter of Caceres where they make the regional Brie-like salty favorite Torta del Casar.
The raw sheep’s milk, salt, and thistle traditional cheese originally made by shepherds has an accidental history in that the shepherds first making it were trying for a hard cheese, but instead the cheese’s core didn’t harden and reached a semi-liquid form. It collapsed. Thinking they had failed in their quest, the farmers gave the creamy cheese away only to see their efforts appreciated and an Extremadura classic was born.
There’s no dodging aerial bird droppings on a gym bike
Bird lovers from Europe flock to the region to see storks often nesting on historic rooftops and utility poles, and seeing vultures, eagles, bustards, and more soaring above. The vast Monfragüe National Park northeast of Caceres was reached by a long winding road which I wouldn’t want to pedal with a loaded touring bike. Black and griffin vultures seemingly danced in the thermals over towering rocky spires. Inside the hotel gym, one could look up and not worry about splotches of white tarnishing a limited travel wardrobe.
Inside, there’s no being rattled by cobblestones like on portions of La Vuelta, Spain’s Tour de France. Winding, narrow, and sometimes steep cobblestone streets like in the old city sections of Merida and Caceres where episodes of Games of Thrones were shot, will really shake you up. Some small villages, like San Martin de Trevejo or Robledillo de Gata, have notched irrigation canals for rain run-off so you have to pay attention to that. Inside at the gym the only rocking you’ll do is from your iPhone.
No bike lights are needed to see the illuminated ruins.
In Merida, the region’s capital of about 50,000 people, ruins seem to appear around every corner. Though the Roman theater and amphitheater are spectacular, seeing the lit Temple of Diana, Roman Bridge, and Alcazaba are impressive enough by foot.
You won’t get a flat running over errant olives. Olives are liquid gold in Spain, olive trees a ubiquitous part of the Extremadura landscape with groves that have been in families for generations. In the region’s northern Sierra de Gato mountains, taking part in a traditional olive harvest by Villamiel’s Aqua Et Oleum boutique hotel (aquaetoleum.com) is hard work.
Outside the restored olive mill, use your hands or a rake to pick up fallen olives, clean off some leaves and branches, and place down nets. Then whack the branches with a pole, milk olives off by hand or use a gas-powered vibrating machine with a six-foot pole and hook to shake them down. The best part is the grilled pork and bread over an open fire followed by homemade wine. Then it’s off to the local olive oil factory to process everything into oil in about 3 to 4 hours. Okay, a bike helmet would have helped as falling olives can easily find a bald head.
A great positive about a gym bike is you don’t have to ride bike back to the hotel room when sleepy from enjoying a Roman style lunch at Casa Romana Aqua Libera in Aljucén (www.aqualibera.com) complete with old Roman-style recipes from hummus to fish while wearing a toga, cloth belt and wreaths in a house replicated like one in ancient times.
Heck, you can even wear the toga back in the hotel gym if you’ve got it. No one back home will ever know.
Marty Basch writes about active lifestyles and those who live them from a dead-end dirt road in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. An Explorers Club member, he’s bicycled, hiked, skied and traveled around sone nice slices of the world, won writing awards, penned books and is curious about what’s around the next bend. Occasionally, he gives entertaining presentations about his long-distance bicycle travels.
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