Aranda del Duero - about 100 kms due north of Madrid. I knew it was too good to be true. It's Day 5 and the Goat's bike has started to disintegrate.

Yesterday we discovered that his pannier rack had broken and today his chain snapped in the Canyon del Rio Lobos (it appears he hasn't had it changed in 8,000 miles!).

We were 5 kilometres out of San Leonardo when it happened and we decided that I would ditch my panniers and time-trial back to town with the chain to get a tool to fix it.

That was a big mistake - within minutes of me leaving, the first of a queue of Spanish cyclists (who all seem to carry small workshops with them) stopped to offer to repair it on the spot.

"Where is the chain?" asked the first and the second and the third.

"My mate's taken it to town," must have seemed like a pathetic answer.

Meanwhile, in San Leonardo, establishing that bike shops were in short supply proved a painful process.

The first old man said there were none.

The second old man agreed, but then a kid driving a Toyota pickup told me there was one and that he would lead me to it.

I showed him the broken chain just to make sure he had understood. The kid said, "Si, vamos a reparar la cadena," and then zoomed off with me in tow on the bike, having to jump red lights to keep up with him, and screeched to a halt outside a bookshop, gesticulating that I should go in.

He clearly meant well so I went in to humour him, hoping that he would drive off but, of course, he waited.

"I don't suppose you fix bikes as well as sell books?" I said to the bewildered bookseller.

Fearing that she was about to call the Guardia Civil I pretended to be interested in a book on Trout Fishing until the kid eventually roared off, satisfied no doubt, that I was a raving lunatic.

I decided that the only way out was to get a taxi to take us to the next big town and a man with a dog took me to see a woman whose husband ran a taxi service in Soria - he would be about 45 minutes.

Meanwhile the Goat was on the phone demanding to know what was happening.

"I've got a waiting list of people here waiting to fix the chain and you're looking round a bookshop with it!"

The taxi didn't turn up anyway of course and eventually Martin called to say that a family of bikers from Zamora had offered to fix it and that they would wait 20 minutes for me to get back.

I time-trialled back to the canyon again to find the Goat having a picnic with the said family and looking relaxed and rested after lying around for the best part of two hours under the shade of a Spanish oak tree.

The last laugh was on the Goat however because, although the Spaniard fixed the chain, the links were not quite the right size with the result that for the rest of the day Martin's chain slipped once every revolution making a horrible grinding sound every time it did so.

"This is driving me nuts," he complained after 6 kilometres.

"Yes, but I find if I drop a hundred metres behind you I can't hear it," I said to console him.

And the day had started so well - apart from being woken up by a mini-bus full of Matadors arriving at our hotel for the festival in Soria and unloading all their kit into the reception below our room.

The scenery is stunning in Spain and the traffic almost non-existent.

Added to that, the Goat imparted some useful information to me concerning Tommy Steele's dad - it appears that he acted as a double for Winston Churchill in WW2.

Armed with this knowledge and a plethora of other useless information that was similarly imparted, I will surely return to the UK a more rounded individual.

Meanwhile in a little village called Casanova one of the locals in the bar, where we had stopped for coffee and olives, had cobwebs on his head.

Life is incredibly slow in central Spain in the summer but this was a first!