March 5, 2023
Quick recap: after five months criss-crossing Europe last summer, from Douglas, Isle of Man to Dubrovnik, Croatia and from Nordkapp to Malaga, Spain, we stored the bike in Spain and spent two months riding rental Hondas in Thailand and Vietnam. Now, after a couple of months at home, we are back on the road, with no specific plans for the direction and the time interval.
We picked the bike up from storage at IMTBikes in Malaga. I can’t say enough good things about these guys; they are great to work with and take great pride in their services. We spent a couple of days in an apartment in the suburb of Huelin, literally next door to where we stayed last September, so we were familiar with the area.
The view from the rooftop terrace of our apartment peeked between the taller buildings at the sea and harbor.
One of our bags stayed in Houston as we flew to Frankfurt and on to Malaga. When I filed a lost bag claim with the airline in Malaga, they told me the bag was in Frankfurt. I showed them my phone and explained that I had an AirTag in the bag and it was actually sitting at Terminal D in Houston. They weren’t happy about being called out on it, but my bag arrived the next day. I was able to watch it transfer in Frankfurt and arrive in Malaga. Liking these AirTags.
Our apartment had a “Candy” oven in it…
The oven had two knobs. The knob on the left was “C”…
And the knob on the right was F. But not dual temperatures.
We actually found a great gourmet hamburger place a few blocks from the apartment. Spanish restaurants are pricey here (ALL restaurants are pricey here), though we’ll eat that too. We even ate Thai noodles one night. I thought after Thailand it would be longer before I could look at Pad Thai.
After some minor adjustments on the bike, like installing a new Quadlock phone mount and tank bag, we loaded up and headed about an hour out of Malaga to El Camino del Rey, or The King’s Little Pathway.
This series of walkways built on the side of cliffs was built in the early 1900s to connect two electrical power plants.
Over the years, the pathway became an adventure-tourism attraction, eventually leading to several deaths and the need to completely reconstruct it in a safer manner.
The entire elevated portion of the walkway is about 2.9 kilometers long, and the entire hike is about 7.3km.
We had a few sprinkles of rain on the way back to Malaga, and the two or three hours on the bike gave us a chance to “shake down” our setup again before heading further south to visit friends near Manilva.