I had an early start as usual, checking my equipment several times, leaving the keys in the door to my room, moving down the stairs from the second floor, and shutting the front door locked behind me. If something was left behind it would imply waiting for a couple of hours until the guest house owners woke up. The weather was perfect for walking, overcast and around twenty degrees centigrade. Moving through a hilly agricultural area with billowing fields of corn and scattered farm houses.

Reaching Antequera early in the afternoon and after spending an hour in the historic town with a skyline dominated by the towers of a Moorish fortress and a multitude of church spires I decided to continue walking for couple of hours. My guide-book has one weakness in that it is not very good at describing the way out of populated areas, so I followed my GPS instead. Sometimes a track can take you in the opposite direction from where you’re going for hours but after a while I got suspicious and examined the GPS more thoroughly. The GR-7 on its way through Andalucía splits up in a northern path and in a southern path and that occurs 15 kilometers east of Antequera. I intended to follow the southern leg but I had the GPS tracks for both routes in my device. When leaving Antequera I just chose to follow the track that was next in sequence and assumed that it was the track leading to the fork where the GR-7 split up.

But there and then I realized that the last common track that led to the fork was missing in the GPS. I had downloaded all files but the person who published the tracks had forgotten to include exactly that vital track. The track I was following was actually an extra track, which was a shortcut to the northern path heading directly out of Antequera, that someone had thought would be of great interest to all hikers 🙂 Well, well, well, I accepted my mistake and turned around 180 degrees and moved back to Antequera in the afternoon sunshine in order to find a place to spend the night and to get something substantial to eat after a long day.