"Chicked" by my wife

Before leaving NZ Kate taught me a new word. “chicked”  Yesterday Bronni showed me want it meant. Don’t you just love the women in your life and the way they continually keep you in your place?

So the plan was to bike to Nijar and back. Google maps reckoned it was 40km to Nijar and would take 3 hrs….. Nah its gotta be wrong we can bike faster than that.

We started out on the bikes reasonably early and immediate began to climb some 750m (2500ft) in the first 4 km. It was a grind as we climbed up this pass that continued to undulate after the initial grunt with 150-250m ascents and descents the next 15 km before dropping back into a large fertile valley filled with tomato’s in plastic houses. The trip across the plains was quick as we had a tail breeze and the final 150m climb into Nijar was on nice new tar seal.……..actually it took 3.5 hours although we did have a coffee stop.

It was the ride back that was worrying me. It was a return trip, we were crossing the same pass, the wind was getting very strong and was going to be in our faces all the way. Bronni was all guns blazing but I bailed. I had a niggling pain in my left knee that I didn’t want to wreck for the slog back. I was “chicked”

Finding a ride back was another exercise. Nijar doesn’t have taxi’s and eventually the Informacion Turistica found a driver of a friend of a friend in a new 250 series Mercedes that took me back to our house at 180km/hr with seemingly total impunity to the Policia Local. He was young, good looking wearing a black suit with dark sunglasses straight off the film set “men in black”. I could visualize the bulge in his jacket and the body tied up in the boot but maybe my imagination was running away.