Frustration

It's been a painfully frustrating morning. The route from Galisteo passes through farmland divided into many plots, with an interminable numbers of farm tracks between them, and which are further dissected by canals and irrigation channels. The route twists and turns along these tracks, but with so many junctions, gates and passes it's hard to be sure you're in the right place. I've followed several tracks that appeared to be correct only to end up in the middle of a field, with the path just petering out.   

Under a leaden drizzling sky the map, which is fairly useless at the best of times rapidly became sodden and even harder to read. There have been few yellow arrows, and those that did appear were mostly ambiguous.

In addition to the yellow arrows there are stones like the one in the photo, these are meant to mark the path of the old Roman road and the way to follow it as closely as possible. The problem is if you find one you can be certain you're on the path at that point, but in terms of working out where to go next they're more obscure.

The line on top of them is, as far as I can tell, meant to show where the route goes, but as you can see from the photo here if you follow the line you'd have to go straight through a barbed wire fence. Not entirely helpful.

So, yes, it's been excellent fun. The Spanish cows have picked up a few choice swearwords in English. 

Ah well, I've made it to a road where i'm pretty certain I'm where I should be.  The bad news is the path now goes back to farm tracks for another 12 km, which look even more horrendous than what I've already done this morning.

This could get very entertaining...