con bici

I got out of Los Silos a little this past weekend. I took the bike and headed uphill. Los Silos is a quaint and cute little village, like something out of a movie with a happy ending - but in comparison with the mountain pueblos Los Silos looks almost cosmopolitan. Beautiful, simple, small communities where life is not complicated though it's certainly a challenge. It was wonderful to see and feel the environment change as I continued to ascend. Tiede, the tallest mountain, was sometimes visible far above to my right, the sea far below to my left. It's just snowed on Tiede, so glimpses of the mountain were striking. I stayed in a very old house, sleeping on the kitchen floor with a fire burning all night in the fireplace. I did a bit of work outside the next day, including picking the fruit from the enormous cactus bushes on the property. On the way back down to the coast I took a different road, through a forest called Mountaña de Agua. It was my first view of the forest here - a gentle, beautiful place that reminded me quite a bit of the forests of the northwest of the US. Both Tenerife and Gran Canaria had huge fires this year like what California suffered just before I left; scars in the forests were visible here and there, but when out of sight I enjoyed the illusion of an uninterrupted expanse of soft green.