WEDNESDAY WHINGE

THEY'RE BACK!!
The cycling tourists have landed, with their skintight team outfits and paper-thin wheels, and we residents groan.
In our view they should be handed a leaflet at the airport informing them in no uncertain terms about the rules of the road and how to be courteous to drivers and pedestrians. It would also help if the policia fined a few of them for their misbehaviour.

For drivers, the solo cyclist breaking the speed-limit in a personal challenge isn't a problem - it's the teams which spread out to cover the same area as an articulated lorry and trundle along at 20kph, chatting as they go and swapping places indiscriminately. They clearly don't give a damn about other road users or any pedestrians at the side of our pavement-less roads.

They leave their homelands in the Frozen North and come for the Tenerife weather, which is understandable, although we have never seen them wearing this little - at least, not yet. Anyone undressed like this could end up with sunburn in some very delicate places!





They also come from flat countries such as Holland to practise 'el bici' on mountain roads such as ours - and you have to admire their stoical masochism -

 but when you meet that same lone rider hogging the centre line at walking pace, after you've already shifted down to second gear, you can be stuck behind him* for hours. There are few passing spaces on roads carved out of a mountain.

*Sorry, but it's always a man.



They also fly in from foreign parts for views such as these, and who can blame them for that? Mount Teide is beautiful.

So if you come to Tenerife to ride a bicycle, please remember we live here. And check your brakes - our mountain is the highest in Spanish territories, and the roads are steep!

Please leave a comment, but I am already aware of the typo in the link - I could find no way to change it once posted! 

PARQUE ROADS - the saga continues!

When the Cabildo improved the TF-655 road from Guaza to Chafiras a few years ago, they levelled out the highs and lows and straightened the bends, but one fifty-metre stretch in Parque de la Reina was left untouched - the houses whose front doors open onto the road would probably collapse if disturbed.

This stretch is a blind hump from both directions with a 40K speed limit that isn't low enough - but drivers ignore that anyway. The only relatively safe place to cross is actually on the brow where your silhouette would be easier to see, but people walk - or run - over on one side to go to Maxcoop supermarket, and on the other side the little old ladies from the little old houses wander across, presumably putting their faith in the Almighty.

Then this week we saw machinery nearby. Was it possible the Cabildo weas about to level it out?

Between downpours, the machine dug out the rough ground at the edge, a metre wide and two metres deep. A man with a stop/go sign stood on the brow of the hill all day, causing even more delays to traffic already diverted away from the collapsed autopista slip road (see earlier posts)

And then at nine o'clock this morning I watched as they began to fill it in again! With picon - small gravel from the volcanic store which comprises Tenerife.


So presumably all they're going to do is cover it with tarmac and go.
Leaving an extra metre for the cars that already zoom over it so fast that their wheels leave the road, and for the cyclists who struggle over it three abreast to spread out even further.

Nice one, Cabildo!