THE SECOND DEGREE

I was determined to adhere to a healthy diet on this journey to Nordkapp. The cycling may be about to provide me with regular exercise, but a regime of stodgy food and red wine had taken its toll on my energy levels in the latter stages of the previous cycles. Perhaps the sizeable town of Los Palacios y Villafranca would be the perfect place to stock up on some of my five-a-day. Lots of banks, estate agents, a few petrol stations, furniture shop and dozens of bars… Greengrocers? Not along the kilometre-long main avenida of Los Palacios.

Salvation came in the form of a few Portakabins bolted together in the middle of a large car park a few kilometres north. Oversized pictures of tomatoes on the side of the 'building' confirmed that I had found a greengrocer's, Spanish style. The establishment was staffed by women in green aprons busying themselves stocking the shelves. There appeared to be just one customer in addition to me: a man in his fifties who was selecting a few items as he wandered. I did likewise and presented my purchases – a banana, an apple and an avocado – to the woman at the cash till.

'Quanto costa?' I enquired in Italian. My Spanish had improved markedly during my five weeks in Cádiz, but I was still mixing up basic (and alas common) Spanish and Italian expressions. My linguistic faux pas didn't faze the woman serving me.

'Son gratis.' They were free. All the women were now chatting and laughing, and I wasn't sure whether it was at my expense or not.

'¿Por qué?' I was back on track with the Spanish, enquiring why.

'Porque…' started the response, rapidly followed by lots of Spanish that was beyond my linguistic pay grade. Sensing my confusion, the woman pointed at the man who I had thought was another customer.

'¡El jefe, el jefe!' He was the boss and, for some reason, had just instructed the woman on the checkout to let me have the fruit for free.

'Muchas gracias, muchas gracias,' I responded but unsure as to why.

I sat outside and ate the fruit. Were these people taking pity on me because I was travelling by bike? Did I have the appearance of a vagrant in need of free food? I reached for my phone, took a selfie and checked the picture: I was looking well and even clean-shaven after having taken advantage of the facilities back at the hostel in Jerez. The kindness of strangers – how wonderful.

My guidebook informed me that there was a campsite to the south of Seville at Dos Hermanas. Having visited twice before, I wasn't planning to take a day off in Seville, but I did want to carry out a little more research into the Vía de la Plata, the pilgrimage route that I would be following for the next week. I would stay at Camping Villsom overnight before cycling 15 km into the centre of the Andalusian capital on Sunday morning. Finding a hotel in Seville for Sunday night would play havoc with my statistics – I was aiming to average 75 km per day over 100 days – but would afford me the time to plan my onward route.

Pitching the tent in an ant-free environment, I bought a can of meatballs and veg at the rudimentary on-site shop and, for the first time, assembled my new MSR Windboiler stove. I had purchased it for its compactness rather than its ability to remain lit even in storm force winds whilst clinging to the edge of a Himalayan peak. The upside of this was that it could boil a litre of water in well under a minute. The downside was that it wasn't great at simmering meatballs. The flame had two settings: off and fighter jet. Had there been any ants, they would have been cooked alive in the afterburn.

The following morning I fell into conversation with Paul from the Netherlands, the first touring cyclist I had met on the journey so far. In his seventies, he had travelled widely over the years, although he wasn't keen on 'following numbers', which I took to mean cycling routes. I refrained from mentioning the EuroVelos. He was softly spoken and smiled through much of our conversation; if he had grandchildren, I imagine they'd have adored him. Rather than cycle all the way from home, he had taken the train to southern Europe, carrying with him a folding bike. He had no timetable and only a vague plan of action that involved shorter rides out into the countryside near the place where he happened to be staying. He would then take the train a little further before returning to two wheels for more sedate exploration. It struck me as a wonderful way to spend some of the free time afforded by retirement. I could only hope that 30 years down the line, my knees would still cope with the pedalling and my back able to withstand consecutive nights on a thin camping mat. It was sometimes a challenge in my forties so please refrain from placing any bets.

As our conversation drew to a natural end and I turned to go back to my tent to pack away, he called me back.

'Remember that there will always be Mercedes days,' he explained.

'What's a Mercedes day?' I enquired.

'It's a day when it's probably raining, perhaps cold, the scenery is not that inspiring and you tell yourself you'd rather be somewhere else.'

'So, why a Mercedes day?'

'Because it's when you wonder why you didn't just buy an air-conditioned Mercedes instead. I've never bought one because I know that the next day will be so much better.'

I smiled, shook his hand and wished him well. I wondered how many Mercedes days I would experience over the coming months. I had certainly had to endure them in the past but, just as Paul had said, the next day was always so much better.

Seville was the same, rather beautiful, Seville that I had discovered on my previous visits. I found a central hotel, the Convento la Gloria which, as the name suggested, was a former convent. The decoration suggested that the nuns had left quite recently and in a hurry, as biblical scenes and statues of the Virgin Mary were still dotted around the place, looking down upon my every move. Away from her prying eyes, my preoccupation for the afternoon was to seek out as much information as I possibly could about the Vía de la Plata.

Plata is the Spanish word for silver and the name is often translated as the 'Silver Way', but its origin is in the Arab word balat, which refers to a paved or cobbled path. It was built by the Romans and is now considered one of the main pilgrimage routes to Santiago, which is why I had been able to access quite a bit of information about cycling along it from the dedicated Vía de la Plata website. A suggested itinerary split the route from Seville to the northern coast at Gijón into 12 days, ranging between 46 km and 105 km. I envisaged only using the first nine of these sections as far as Benavente, at which point I would head east. The first suggested leg was to the town of Monesterio and it would be 105 km. That was no bad thing, as my average since leaving Tarifa had slumped to only 67 km per day. A longer day in the saddle was needed and, after my rest day, I was up for the challenge.

A charming woman at the oficina de turismo had provided me with a map indicating interesting diversions en route and a business card for the Amigos del Camino de Santiago de Sevilla Vía de la Plata (Friends of the Vía de la Plata). Their office was in the western part of central Seville. Adopting a flagrant disregard towards oneway signs, I located it within a few minutes in a covered alleyway off the Calle Castilla. How wonderful it would be to start my journey along the pilgrimage route by having an in-depth chat with a group of real experts! I'd tweeted to say I'd be visiting and they'd rapidly retweeted, perhaps thrilled at having a prestigious cycling writer come to pay them a visit. They might even want to take a photograph. (Had I shaken off the vagrant look?) It was all potentially very exciting.

The office was shut.

I could hang around to see them at 7 p.m. or come back on Wednesday at 10 a.m. The office itself wasn't the tourist-friendly welcoming point that I had envisaged. They'd gone more for the inner-city youth club design, with a painted metal door and bars across the window.

I stood for a few moments, and looked up and down the street. I wasn't even sure which way I should be going.

The comment – the traditional good luck salutation to pilgrims – was directed at me by a man who was clearly out for a long walk; wherever he was heading, I needed to be heading too.

'¡Perdón!' I called as I tried to catch him up. '¿Dónde es el camino?'

His name was Antonio and he patiently answered my questions as to where exactly I should be heading, using the kind of map that I wish I had invested in. It even included dotted-line variants for when the cycling path deviated from that of the walkers. He pointed to one of the seashell signs that I should be looking out for, wished me well and off we went at our different speeds.

As the seashell signs were primarily intended for walkers rather than cyclists, they were easy to miss. With a few twists and turns, I eventually made it to the Río Guadalquivir, having travelled the epic distance of about… 2 km from the centre of Seville. I had already lost count of the number of times I had stopped cycling to search for a directional seashell.

It was another walker. He read bemusement on my face and explained I should follow the yellow arrows. Whereas the seashells were official, the yellow arrows were very much unofficial. Most had been daubed or sprayed on the ground, a building or anything else that happened to be handy (a confused cyclist?). They were much more useful than the seashells in that they indicated the direction when it wasn't all that clear.

Alas, on the other side of the bridge over the Río Guadalquivir, the arrows directed me down a steep bank and towards a rough track running alongside the river. I looked ahead of me; there was no alternative access route to the track so, reluctantly and very hesitantly, I pushed Reggie down the bank, fighting to counter the effects of gravity on his fully laden frame. We eventually made it to the bottom, where I remounted and started to cycle along the track. Within a couple of hundred metres, it had degenerated into freshly churned mud. Not wishing to return to the main road and climb the steep bank that I had earlier descended, I persevered. For much of the time I pushed; where I dared, I rode. Was this a taste of things to come?

After another 5 km and with my enthusiasm for the Vía de la Plata waning considerably, the track passed under the motorway – the Autovía Ruta de la Plata – and across the N-630, subtitled on the signs as the Ruta de la Plata. I paused under the awning of a BP petrol station to ponder the situation. My high hopes of being able to cycle along quality off-road paths had been dashed. It was developing into a Mercedes morning.

I looked at the map of the Vía de la Plata given to me by the tourist office. Three long lines linked Seville with my destination, Monesterio: on the left was the pink walking/cycling route, in the middle was the white motorway and on the right was the red N-630. All three had a legitimate claim to call themselves the Ruta de la Plata. For a cyclist, the autovía was not even an option, but the N-630 most certainly was. In fact… surely the N-630 had more of a claim to call itself the Ruta/Vía de la Plata than the other two? The autovía was a modern-day construction. The walking/cycling route was surely a relatively modern path born out of the pragmatic desire to keep walkers (and a few cyclists) away from the main road, right? The N-630 was, I conjectured, the modern name given to a road that had existed in various states for hundreds of years. Perhaps even a couple of thousand years, dating all the way back to the Romans. The original Ruta/Vía de la Plata was the N-630!

However plausible or implausible my reasoning, in terms of cycling the decision was an excellent one. The N-630 was a wide, good quality road almost devoid of traffic. All but a handful of cars, lorries and buses had decided to make use of the toll-free A66 motorway, leaving those who hadn't to trundle past Reggie and me in an amiable fashion. They were presumably on short journeys to and from the smaller towns and villages not served by the autovía. Even the ascent from sea level in Seville to around 500 metres at the northern border of Andalusia was sufficiently stretched out over 80 km that it could hardly be called taxing. The air was increasingly cool but the sky was blue and I was making real progress north. This had been no Mercedes day.