My compromise, which I had managed to equate to Laurie Lee's lift with the booksellers, was at walk to a village 10km outside of Segovia and take a train from there up the mountain to the town of Cercedilla, which was reputed for being good walking territory. So I packed my rucksack under the conviction that I wasn't a complete fraud, apologized to the Germans and kissed Blanca goodbye.
As the train set off I tried to absorb as much of the passing surroundings, in the futile hope that I might be able to bulk it up with some metaphysical metaphors on my blog to make it sound like Id actually walked these mountains. But then we charged through a tunnel and I realized, for all my capacity for fantasy, even I couldn't stretch a half truth that far.
Cercedilla was heaving with Sunday morning ramblers and cyclists, and as I exited the train I realized the town was sat in a sort of shallow basin between two peaks. It's geography created a contained sort of nature, which the tourist board had exploited for the benefit of these city rats, who wanted fresh air without the fungi and regular picnic tables where they could enjoy the contents of the cool boxes. For the next few hours I followed the 'blue trail', which had markers on every other tree so that even the most directionless soul (I am included in this category) could walk mindlessly round in a circle and end up back at their car.
By 2 o'clock I had had enough, so I returned to where I'd hidden my rucksack to discover that I had propped it up against a highly active ants nest. By luck (or the smell of socks within) the ants had created special paths which avoided my bag and so all was well. I boarded a train for the suburbs of Madrid and was woken half an hour later from an open-mouthed slumber by a ticket inspector. I waited in the mid afternoon sun for Jess to pick me up in Torreledonas and by the time she arrived I had sufficiently sunburnt my fore arms. And so it was that I 'walked' the Sierra de Guadarrama in a day.
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