 | 25.4.12 Wednesday. Las Cabezas de San Juan to Utrera.
We leave our palacial appartments
opposite the little church of San Roque early having eaten in last night and completed a big wash in a machine by drying clothes on our roof opposite the storks. Every so often Betsy would go missing and be found up there trying for a photo of one standing up on the nest on the bell tower.
A long day is anticipated, headtorches light the streets out of town to the irrigation canal and dawn appears as we march down the canal.
We see occasional cars and vans on the tracks at the side of the canal mostly farmers tending the humming pumping stations sucking water out and over the huge fields. Quite a lot of the blackwinged stilts are on the fields and also to Betsy's delight a hare who races off at high speed when finally he lost his nerve 3m from the track when the last members of the party passed. Three of us had aready passed by without seeing him. We pause briefly for a break under the roadbridge over canal and railway line at Estacion de las Acantarillas. Not so much a station as a passing place on the single line from Seville to Cadiz whose route we have followed more or less from Puerto Real.
It is obviously in the process of a major up grade but no work is seen in progress we presume as a consequence of Spains financial crisis.
Eventually we leave the canal and take to tracks across the fields stopping again for a good self made lunch of ham and cheese boccadillos and olives with the remains of the wine box we failed to finish last night. The pace picks up a little after this as we pass the municipal dump to enter Utera, we are starting to feel a bit like burgalars standing on the dustbin to gain entry to houses and hope this does not become our normal MO for entering towns. Soon after the pace flaggs but we now enter the town through the Jerez gate into old Andalusian style architecture and ask at the well placed (and still open) tourist office for a map and a pension. Shortly after we collapse exhaused in the main square and a man brings us some beer! Result. About seven and a half hours for 33km.
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